I definitely think GPT is better than Bard, but Bard definitely did live up to the hype in a few ways. The two that blew my mind (and still do to some extent) are the blazing speed and the ability to pull information real time (no more pesky knowledge cutoff date). Bard also felt pretty comparable to 3.5 to me, better in some things and worse in others. Coding was definitely a bust with Bard.

I do not recall Bard being said to be better than any particular other model, but then having worse performance by some metric when released.

Your link isn’t really an indication of an overpromise.

Bard isn't a model, it's a product. Saying comparisons against "Bard" without specifying a particular point in time are like analyses of "ChatGPT" without specifying a model. There have been a number of releases adding more features, tool use, making it smarter, and crucially adding more languages. ChatGPT is not fine-tuned in different languages – it manages them but lacks cultural context. That's one place Bard is quite far ahead from what I've seen.