I guess within the domain of AI, a pertinent question would be: "do I want to use anything but the best?" The errors older models give being directly analogous to being stupider in my eyes.
Depends — many tasks in various pipelines have a reasonable Pareto frontier and diminishing returns after a certain level of performance. You may just have a high budget constraint (say like YouTube computing ASR subtitles; they are not going to be using the best ASR models because it’s expensive). If it’s myself, with a coding agent, I’m going to get the best thing I can afford.