It's how it works with Vettel. The complete opposite of how it works with Alonso who's also gained immensely with the same strategy in the same weekend and is seen as the driver of the day as a result while you would be hard-pressed to find a congratulatory post about Vettel without a snide remark next to it at least. It'd be funny if it wasn't sad and unfair too.
Vettel had a faster lap than Raikkonen in their first quali shots and was almost on the provisional pole. Then he lost to Raikkonen by 0.010 sec. After the quali everyone was saying Raikkonen was much faster. In the race for the most of the first stint he was just under 1.5 seconds behind Raikkonen despite going for a longer stint and the gap only opened a couple of seconds more right around the pitstops when they told Raikkonen to push for the pit window. (But mind you if you look at their lap times, it's not like Raikkonen found some hidden pace and left him in the dust, it was double the effect since around the time Raikkonen starts putting in some consistent lap times, Vettel consistently slows his by around half a second as well. Anyway...) The gap is around 4 seconds when Raikkonen pitted.
After Raikkonen's pitstop he held the gap back to Raikkonen and pulled away from the Haas drivers, opening up enough of a gap for a pit stop in the process. He actually didn't even need a gap to them if he was going longer anyway, but you wouldn't know any of this watching the Sky commentary team as they kept talking about how he had to keep going longer and longer because he wasn't as fast as Raikkonen to open up a gap to the Haas drivers. He pitted, gained from it on a rare occasion in his racing career in Formula 1 actually, along with Alonso and Ricciardo who are praised for their performance. He opened up a 10 sec gap to his teammate after the SC period, all the while about just a second ahead of his rival. All people can talk about afterwards is he was slower than Raikkonen and barely performed acceptably in comparison to a bunch of other drivers and completely lucked into it because he was slower and had to be left out there to protect his 3rd place or something. Ted was talking about conspiracies on Ferrari switching their drivers around even in the first stint, it was like one of the first things he said during the race actually... He sounded so stupid that even Crofty shot him down. So it's not very surprising that he tries to create a conspiracy all the while playing it like "I'm not one of those nut cases, but...."
This thing with Raikkonen also happens every race weekend since Vettel's lap times can be slower or not much faster in FPs and Q1, Q2 quali sessions. Up until the pole laps or the race itself, but never mind. We'll still keep doing it every race weekend.
Still it's not specific to Vettel all the time. Ricciardo, Raikkonen, Hamilton, all can go on multiple off track excursions, but Verstappen is to blame for breaking his car over those curbs before his bigger incident and he should follow other's lead, especially Ricciardo, and learn from them because their good luck prevented them from breaking their cars while they were off the track by even more.