Do you mean Flash and not Pro? I haven't tried it personally, but according to OpenRouter, the fastest DeekSeep V4 Pro providers are only ~50tps. That's slower than Claude Opus.
In recent benchmarking I've been doing, DeepSeek V4 Pro was the fastest of 21 models, by a comfortable margin (https://swelljoe.com/html/bench-report-final.html). Faster than Claude Opus 4.8, which was the second fastest (Mistral doesn't count because it seems to have refused to participate). But, it's a limited data set, just a few benchmark runs of a limited set of tasks. It's entirely possible I happened to be calling the API at its least busy time and maybe Claude got hit during a busy time.
I don't think token speed matters as much when a lot of tokens are needed to achieve a task. E.g. artificial analysis benchmarks where deepseek v4 is one of the biggest token burners to go through the benchmark.
Flash is amazing if you know the domain really well.
E.g. occasionally it makes the dumbest mistakes you've ever seen and can't correct them. However it's fairly rare, and if you know the domain really well, occasionally popping in the code and pushing it towards the correct solution takes like 20seconds or whatever.
So the speed you can move with flash + high domain knowledge beats opus by a mile in my experience.
I tried to switch back to 4.8 for a bit when it came out, feels so bad waiting 20mins for a mediocre solution when I could have had everything complete - with multiple iteration cycles - in flash in like 3-5mins.
For losers who can't put together a program to save their life, have no real skills and were always not really interested in programming (hence their poor skills), renting a robot buddy to do it for them is a good deal, until the buddy cuts in materially into their salary, and until their bosses realize that they really just have robot operators on staff instead of people who can actually do things.
Or when I'm working two contract gigs. I can spec things out for one and turn it loose and trust it. Then work more closely with deepseek on the other project.