Users always have the choice to ignore benchmarks or run their own

Exactly. Even a brief one (a single task done on two models) showed me GLM 5.3 Flash was superior to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash.

DS used nearly twice the budget to accomplish the same thing.

Ideally, these tasks should be something you actually need day to day.

That’s missing the point. Frontier models get shittier in certain ways with each release, due to benchmaxxing, and there is nothing we can do about that.