Maybe a better question is when will SOTA models be "good enough"?
At the moment there appears to be ~no demand for older models, even models that people praised just a few months ago. I suspect until AGI/ASI is reached or progress plateaus, that will continue be the case.
Yes, this is exactly my point. Thank you for stating it better.
The current SOTA closed model providers are also all rolling out access to their latest models with better pricing (e.g. GPT-5 this week), which seems like a confounding factor unique to this moment in the cycle. An API consumer would need to have a very specific reason to choose GPT-4o over GPT-5, given the latter costs less, benchmarks better and is roughly the same speed.