I think it's similar to how an artist's eye is ahead of their hand [1]. As you get more experience with the models you start to notice their shortcomings more and more. When a new model comes out, everything seems crazy good for a while, until you start to realize the weak points again. Benchmarks aren't everything, but people have created numerous benchmark trackers because of this phenomena and no one has caught degraded performance yet, other than this post catching that something changed (no connection as of yet to performance though)

[1] https://www.rensoart.com/why-your-eye-is-ahead-of-your-hand-...