I didn't say that. However, the utility delta in the "early days" was infinitely more palpable. By the time GPT-5 or GPT-6 came out, these models were just doing things they did before more accurately, with more context integrity across long-horizon tasks, etc., not doing things they couldn't do before.
This is true of every frontier model. The real agentic coding breakthrough in Claude land was around Opus 4.5 or so, though it's hard to say if that might have just been coeval with the release of the Claude Code harness.
On the Chinese front (my preferred landscape because of the open weight aspect, not because I'm Chinese), Kimi has been perfectly viable since K2.5, DeepSeek since however many major releases ago, and GLM and MiMo and the rest of them too, although they all achieved breakout moments of publicity at different times. There's no denying that every release brings improvements, but if we're going to be honest, they're fairly marginal.