I see your point. On the other side, I can think of one reason for wanting to remove superfluous words: the user pays per token.
If you're paying for API, you have text-davinci, it is not behaving the way like free ChatGPT behaves.
No, you can get both gpt-3.5-turbo (GA) and gpt4 (behind a waitlist) via API, not just text-davinci and other non-chat models.