Just looked this up, no longer true. Explore subagents inherit whatever model the parent is. And you can of course make other subagent configs.
I mean, if you could get Opus or even Sonnet 4.5 at 1000+ tok/s exploring the codebase, they would probably change that setting back.
But either way, I think GP's overall sentiment of "delegating intelligence-saturated tasks to an outdated but fast subagent" makes a lot of sense.
That's solely so that you burn more money. It's totally unnecessary to assume the parent model. Sure, it could be upgraded from Haiku if there was a solid reason to, but...