I have been a long time user of Colab Pro+ and that might be true, but I have noticed a significant difference in the quality of GPU I get now. You can specify a 'premium' GPU now vs standard. I can get an A100-40Gb any time I want right now, whereas before that was rare. For 100 credits you can train for about 6.5 hours on that. Anyway, I think you're right that they just give you more transparency, but you also get more choice in how aggressively you want to spend the credits. I suspect that the A100s are more available now after these changes.

When I want to use Colab, what I do now is develop on my desktop machine until I have everything working properly and then just train as needed on Colab when I need more compute.