At this point I really only take rigorous research papers in to account when considering this stuff. Apple published research just this month that the parent post is referring to. A systematic study is far more compelling than an anecdote.
Changing names does not affect the performance of Sota models.
Which figure are you referring to? For instance figure 8a shows a -32.0% accuracy drop when an insignificant change was added to the question. It's unclear how that's "within the margin of error" or "Changing names does not affect the performance of Sota models".
Their errors appear to disappear when you correctly set the context from conversational to adversarial testing — and Apple is actually testing the social context and not its ability to reason.
I’m just waiting for Apple to release their GSM-NoOp dataset to validate that; preliminary testing shows it’s the case, but we’d prefer to use the same dataset so it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. (They claim it will be released “soon”.)