I also used to see Grok boosting/slack-cutting on here/Reddit constantly back in Peak Subsidy when xAI was giving out hundreds of dollars of credits for free per month.

After they killed that and then stopped handing out free model access to users of every Cline fork for weeks following model releases, vibe coder hype moved back to Chinese models for cost and the SOTA models for quality.

Agreed. There's are plenty of instances where people here on HN do mental gymnastics to justify using a truly good product when the company that builds it is morally bankrupt.

Not a criticism (I probably engage in that sort of thinking myself sometimes), just something I've observed. If Grok were actually good, we'd see that phenomenon here, but we don't.