I think the 'pelican test' is becoming useless. It's been around long enough that now I'm sure good examples are in the training data, and hell they might even do some hand tuning to make it do a decent job since they know people will ask about it.
But either way, with no real way to visualize the result of the text it starts with - it will always be stabbing in the dark. It can't understand conceptually what any of it should look like and then refine the SVG to improve it gradually. It just throws darts at a wall and hopes it comes out alright.
I think it's still useful in a "hello world" sort of way. It means you actually tried the new model.
Honestly that's the main value I get from it myself - making a pelican means I have to figure out API keys and how to talk to the provider, or how to run it locally for the local models.
Pelicans, maybe, but the point is to measure how good the "internal visualization" abilities are. Throw curveballs, like a unicorn with a duck bill serving coffee at a basketball court. An elephant playing a piano while its trunk swings a baseball bat at a tiny alien spaceship buzzing its head.
Have them use tikz instead of svg, or have it write code that moves the cursor and draws the thing in paint.
Compositionality and visualization are generally much, much better at each new generation / release cycle.
It's fascinating how well models have internalized visualizing things without actually having joint embeddings / broad multimodality.