I think one of the main causes of rapid decline is the openai/evals repo that OpenAI is using the crowdsource the "safety" neutering of GPT-4.

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aopenai%2Fevals+safety+OR+...

Contributors in return get access to the 32K token version of GPT-4. This incentivize people to make up a ton of bullshit safety related evals.