The only meaningful improvements were opus 4.5 and now opus 5.5, people claiming otherwise are delusional. The gap between opus 4.5 and the next big thing was massive, now the same is true for opus 5.5 as much as I hate to admit it anthropic is running the show right now.

They did but IMO they had very low standards. I have very high standards and Opus 5.5 pretty much meets them (at least for Rust).

"People said it before and it wasn't true then" isn't really an argument about it being true now. There are plenty of things that happened where the zealots jumped the gun with the hype. Bitcoin for example. "People said bitcoin was going to succeed in 2005, 2006, 2007...". Or even the web. It was mega hyped in the dot com boom and then crashed and of course loaaads of stupid people thought that was the end of it.