Just today, it was announced that Stack Exchange will no longer be deploying increased privilege thresholds of "full" sites to sites that today have beta reputation levels (and will instead deploy site-specific overrides as necessary). This follows another announcement last May stating that these "full" thresholds are no longer tied to getting a site design.
Today's announcement makes a good argument for the change: it isn't really fair to consider increased reputation requirements a milestone (like leaving beta or getting a design) as it may be a burden in many cases. Some sites may still produce good content but their primary users may never end up earning the required reputation for important moderation privileges, and it isn't fair to suddenly revoke everyone's content moderation privileges just because some users are abusing lower-level privileges (such as tag creation).
I can also see this being an issue for sites that already have the increased privilege levels. For instance, if a site's high-reputation population ends up leaving the site (such as due to a certain major scandal in late 2019), the site may have a large base of users who know full well the content curation rules and how to use their tools but be locked out of using them due to their lower reputation.
The previous announcement states:
while sites that do not already have the higher levels may keep the "beta" levels even if they get a design
Has this changed with today's announcement? Can a site that already has the higher levels request to be reverted to beta levels (whether those higher levels were granted as a milestone on leaving beta or getting a design, or not)?
