This is the first time there's been a non-private model at the top, and I'd wager top 3.
This isn't OSS either.
Not sure where the jaundiced view comes from. I generally believe the free models tend to be overrated, but I don't think it's a good idea to pretend there's widespread gaming of this. There's a strong self-peasantization streak in LLM discussions, and truth is, no one thing may be "correct", but we can't exclude all data without making the very act of discussion meaningless.