The target users for this behavior are the ones using GPT as a replacement for social interactions; these are the people who crashed out/broke down about the GPT5 changes as though their long-term romantic partner had dumped them out of nowhere and ghosted them.

I get that those people were distraught/emotionally devastated/upset about the change, but I think that fact is reason enough not to revert that behavior. AI is not a person, and making it "warmer" and "more conversational" just reinforces those unhealthy behaviors. ChatGPT should be focused on being direct and succinct, and not on this sort of "I understand that must be very frustrating for you, let me see what I can do to resolve this" call center support agent speak.

True, neither here, but i think what we're seeing is a transition in focus. People at oai have finally clued in on the idea that agi via transformers is a pipedream like elons self driving cars, and so oai is pivoting toward friend/digital partner bot. Charlatan in cheif sam altman recently did say they're going to open up the product to adult content generation, which they wouldnt do if they still beleived some serious amd useful tool (in the specified usecases) were possible. Right now an LLM has three main uses. Interactive rubber ducky, entertainment, and mass surveillance. Since I've been following this saga, since gpt2 days, my close bench set of various tasks etc. Has been seeing a drop in metrics not a rise, so while open bench resultd are imoroving real performance is getting worse and at this point its so much worse that problems gpt3 could solve (yes pre chatgpt) are no longer solvable to something like gpt5.

Indeed, target users are people seeking validation + kids and teenagers + people with a less developed critical mind. Stickiness with 90% of the population is valuable for Sam.