Honestly, I personally would rather a time-out than the quality of my response noticably downgrading. I think what I found especially distrustful is the responses from employees claiming that no degredation has occured.
An honest response of "Our compute is busy, use X model?" would be far better than silent downgrading.
Are they convinced that claiming they have technical issues while continuing to adjust their internal levers to choose which customers to serve is holistically the best path?
An honest response of "Our compute is busy, use X model?" would be far better than silent downgrading.