I mean, in general they aren't wrong.

You can't fool everybody all of the time, but you can fool almost everybody most of the time.

But most of all, it's easy to fool yourself.

It always reminds of the story of the creator of counter strike. Every new release he would get a ton of complaints from players about things they didn't even change. Notably that each version had more lag. And he got so fed that he start to negatively subtract peoples pings. And suddenly a ton of players reported back that the change was incredibly good.

Point is, I really don't buy all the stories about a model suddenly being downgraded without at least a modicum of substance. People are grasping at straws in the noise.