OpenAI in my estimation has the habit of dropping a model's quality after its introduction. I definitely recall the web ChatGPT 5.2 being a lot better when it was introduced. A week or two later, its quality suddenly dropped. The initial high looked to be to throw off journalists and benchmarks. As such, nothing that OpenAI says in terms of model speed can be trusted. All they have to do is lower the reasoning effort on average, and boom, it becomes 40% faster. I hope I am wrong, because if I am right, it's a con game.

Starting off the ChatGPT Plus web users with the Pro model, then later swapping it for the Standard model -- would meet the claims of model behavior consistency, while still qualifying as shenanigans.