Depends how you define "worse in every way". With my own personal testing, DeepSeek's distillations have been able to do the task when the original upstream model either couldn't, or was marginally worse yet.

You're preaching to the anti-choir on this, though: I do not think LLMs are ready for use yet. Maybe another few years, maybe another few decades, we'll find out I guess, but what we have today sure as hell isn't it.