> It seems to me like this is yet another instance of just reading vibes, like when GPT 5 was underwhelming and people were like "AI is dead"

This might be part of what you meant, but I would point out that the supposed underwhelmingness of GPT-5 was itself vibes. Maybe anyone who was expecting AGI was disappointed, but for me GPT-5 was the model that won me away from Claude for coding.