This is absolutely not my experience. I regularly (weekly at least) use whisper for 90-120 minutes pieces of content and only rarely have problems.

This is just plain wrong. I have my own Whisper App in the AppStore (on iOS, with very limited memory capacity) and there are no problems at all with longer Audio / Video files.

I've never had whisper complete a single attempt a anything over 75 min

Can't really declare that without declaring which whisper model in particular you are referring to, as there are a number of them

I’ve used whisper-cop on 5-hour podcasts without problems.

Would also love to hear what you mean by “smart invisible regex,” sounds like AI slop to me.