Strangely enough this is one of the first times here I see someone with the exact same experience. GPT-5 is very prone to a style that would for most codebases be overengineering. I think as a large part of HN works on huge enterprise FAANG-like code, this is where it shines, so here it gets rave reviews of just being the best overall. But globally, for most developers, it's overengineering and adds a lot of unnecessary code to maintain. Sonnet in that sense remains "every man's coder". I've gone back from 4.5 to 4 now, having spent a good chunk of time with 4.5 it just seems like a slight overall regression with no real upsides besides being a little faster than 4.