I regularly use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, and I'm convinced that Gemini's enormous context window isn't that helpful in many situations. I think the more you put into context, the more likely the model is to go off into on a tangent and you end up with "context rot" or get confused and start working on an older no longer relevant context. You definitely need to manage and clear your context window and the only time I would want such a large context window is when the source data is really that large.

Context quality and relevance is indeed a major factor. But large size is not the core issue, although in unmaintained or poor relevance context situations a smaller window is going to blissfully forget the bad, and the good, sooner.