Is the pinyin of 「操」in「情操」and「步操」the same in Mandarin？
Modern Mandarin Chinese has been very different from Medieval Chinese, while Cantonese has preserved much legacy from the latter.
Although I don't speak Cantonese, I think it's plausible that 操 in Medieval Chinese and in Cantonese has more than one pronunciation.
However, even in Modern Chinese, pronunciations do change over time, especially when a commonly-used word sounds like... fuck. (You can also see many people online using 操 instead of the original fuck character to express that meaning, but they do this just because they don't know which is the original character, or they need to avoid censorship...).
OK. Time for a sip of knowledge. I said pronunciations change over time in Modern Chinese. It happens mostly in characters that are commonly used, but have different pronunciations only when used as a surname:

盖(formerly ge3 like 舸, now mostly gai4)
纪(formerly ji3 like 己, now commonly ji4)

But this doesn't happen to all such characters:

解(always xie4 like 谢 if used as surname, rather than jie3)
仇(always qiu2 like 球 if used as surname, rather than chou2)

As far as I know, the only character other than surnames that has a changed pronunciation is:

帧(&quot;frame&quot;, formerly zheng4 like 正, now zhen1 like 真)