I believe so, this checks out with my experience, especially when comparing between the US models and Chinese models which benchmark scores are neck to neck with US ones.

My experience with Chinese open models is that they couldn't cope at all with my production work; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 ( or was it 4.1? Couldn't remember too well) went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them.

Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price for Chinese models, in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time was wasted on thinking, and this was regardless of whether they finished the tasks or not.