Strongly agreed. I think this is a large part of the reason behind dissonance of opinions on AI usefulness we see even here: unless you are intentional about it, your main experience with AI is that of non-SOTA or budget versions of the models.
What makes it worse is that even if you are intentional and are willing to pay, it doesn't help everywhere. Gemini as voice assistant defaults to Flash and there is no choice to change it, even though the speed of the faster model hardly matters here, while accuracy does. Same with AI suggestions everywhere, and other such "ambient" features.
The flip site of being intentional about always using SOTA models, is that you notice when you are not getting them.