Earlier quoted context omitted.
Siri is so bad it needs to be scrapped and rethought from the ground up (it can’t even give me the time when internet is down at my rural house). No one at Apple who wants a career there would dare propose that. The switch to a LLM architecture could be the perfect transition point for this.
If Siri can't give you the time without the internet, I think you need to update iOS. There are definitely two tiers of Siri queries. There are queries like "set the brightness to 10%" or "set a timer for 5 minutes" which absolutely and consistently work without internet, and have for several years, and if you're legitimately having a different experience then its possible a cosmic ray hit your iPhone (or, realistica…
interesting - latest iOS in airplane mode - "hey siri what time is it?" - "you need to turn off airplane mode to do that"
but - "hey siri set a time for 5 minutes" - works just fine