yeah, but I mean more like the old setups where you'd just load a model on a 4090 or something, even with MoE it's a lot more complex and takes more VRAM, right? like it just seems not justifiable for most hobbyists

but maybe I'm just slightly out of the loop

With sparse MoE it's worth running the experts in system RAM since that allows you to transparently use mmap and inactive experts can stay on disk. Of course that's also a slowdown unless you have enough RAM for the full set, but it lets you run much larger models on smaller systems.