The thing is, that broadly these sorts of hiccups happen all the time, but every time one of them escalates to 'meme' status, they can institute covering for it in pretty short order.
When you use them routinely, you see them do the hiccups regularly on random things you weren't expecting, but if one of those hiccups goes viral, then it stops working.
I managed to get in barely in time to see the seahorse emoji before the meme became self-defeating.
The viral instances only work very briefly to illustrate a behavior, as very well known specific examples will get covered. In your case, at one point suddenly all the LLMs were really good at knowing the letters in strawberry, but you ask about other words they would fall over because they only had that specific thing there. By now, I suspect most have implemented a scheme to ensure a more appropriate mechanism handles counting letters in a word, to spare the embarassment.