This is the commodification of models. There is nothing special about the new models but they perform better on the benchmarks.
They are all interchangeable. This is great for users as it adds to price pressure.
They are not so good at measuring reasoning, out-of-domain performance, or creativity.
As big players look to start monetizing, they are going to desperately be searching for moats.
Right now, in my opinion, OpenAI has actually a useful deep research feature which I've found nobody else matches. But there is no moat to be seen there.
I might be mistaken, but originally the reasoning was fully hidden? Or maybe it was just far more aggressively purged. I agree that today the reasoning output seems higher quality then originally.
It's called the "first step fallacy", and AI hype believers continue to fall for it.