GPT-3.5 performance for basic programming tasks used to be just fine, but over the past few weeks the output quality has dropped dramatically. All of this tweaking definitely has it's downsides.
GPT 3.5 used to be good enough, so I never bothered getting a paid account. I also heard some reports about 3.5 actually being better for the type of coding tasks I usually offload.
I do have a 4090 available at work, if the extra 8GB vRAM makes a big difference. The task I used as a test case was converting existing PHP & JS code (views and controllers) with static texts to files with dynamic translation references.