Yeah, not a placebo for me. There could be minor drift that I didn't observe with the old camera that happens for the average person as well, but the ridiculous drift & tracking issues that I was experiencing did absolutely get fixed with me using this camera. The difference was really obvious to both me, the person who was playing, and my brother who was observing. I only centered Headmaster once at the beginning and didn't touch the controller at all until it was time to turn off the system 20-30 minutes later, whereas with my bundled camera, I was having to recenter after every round or turn my chair to compensate (and this was after doing the optimal setup with the "reduced" drifting). And this wasn't just a one time thing, it was every time, over the last few days. I never had one session with the bundled camera where I didn't have to recenter/calibrate after every round before.
I then proceeded to play the Heist section which had terrific tracking and no wobble whatsoever.
After seeing the difference, I have to chalk this up to manufacturing shortcomings. So it may not necessarily be a "get the old camera to make it work properly", maybe a different new camera would also result in something like this for people experiencing serious issues while having done all the optimizations possible to their setup.
Also, I rarely ever use suspend/resume on my ps4. And haven't done so far the last few months, so the differences I've seen can't be chalked up to a cold boot, because if that was the case, I would've seen them earlier, I've tried anything and everything possible to fix the tracking/drift issues with the bundled camera, and while alleviating the issues to a certain degree, the constant left drift was still present, and the controller tracking (which I thought was supposed to be how it is, until I experienced how it was supposed to be) was actually pretty bad.
And yeah, there's the software aspect as well, like VR Worlds never managing to center quite right, whereas Headmaster has always been terrific in that regards (even when the bad drifting was happening)