The onus is on you to prove or at least convincingly argue that the results are unlikely to generalize across incremental model releases. In my personal experience, the overly affirming nature seems to have held since GPT-3. What makes you think a newer, larger model would not exhibit this behavior? Beyond "they're more capable"? I'd argue that being more capable doesn't mean less sycophantic.

It's certainly possible some of the new advances (chain-of-thought, some kind of agentic architecture) could lessen or remove this effect. But that's not what the paper was studying! And if you feel strongly about it, you could try to further the discussion with results instead of handwavingly dismissing others' work.