It's not like Bitfinex has ever allowed anyone to cash out their USDT for USD (despite claims to the contrary) so maybe this is just them coming clean about that fact?
They've also removed (false) claims about being audited from their FAQs section[0]
I haven't been able to test this directly since I'm in New York and therefore am not allowed to have an account on Bitfinex, but nobody has reported withdrawal difficulties in a very long time, and Bitfinex has always treated USDT deposits as USD without any explicit or implicit conversion.
Bitfinex has had withdrawal problems and banking problems in the past, but to my knowledge the only recent problems have been around times when USD/USDT has disconnected, largely due to delays in Bitfinex's fiat withdrawal pipeline that have all since been resolved.
You're right -- I hadn't realized that we're currently in a regime of tether being discounted and withdrawals being slow or not working. After the previous discount recovered the withdrawal problems went away (obviously correlation running in the other direction), but I hadn't been tracking that the discount has reappeared.
Outside of periods of withdrawal difficulty, though, the reports slow to a trickle and then dry up.
It would be interesting to pull the history of the bitfinex sub and plot the frequency of posts mentioning "withdraw" against the kraken USDT/USD pair to get hard data on this rather than my anecdotes, though.
What is your source for nobody having any withdraw difficulties? I'm seeing heaps of USD withdraw problems on various twitter feeds that track this kind of thing.
BTC withdraw etc. seems to be working fine but not USD.
They've also removed (false) claims about being audited from their FAQs section[0]
[0] https://tether.to/faqs/ vs https://web.archive.org/web/20180628141947/https://tether.to...