> I feel like the pelican test can't be relevant anymore;

It never was. The point of this "pelican test" was for performative reasons, or just for attention of the joke.

It is like trying to test whether if an adult elephant could actually climb up a tree and reporting that some elephants are slightly better at doing that than others while also reporting at the same time that they are all bad at tree climbing anyway.

This is an example of testing for the sake of testing. The "pelican test" tests for nothing.