Yeah you definitely have to be skeptical regarding sentiment for open/local model capabilities, since there's bias from what people want to be true.

I generally agree with this in spirit https://www.seangoedecke.com/are-new-models-good/ , but I think you can read Anthropic's results showing Sonnet 5 as almost strictly worse than Opus 4.8 as very credible/meaningful, and then draw comparisons from that