You are missing context.

A local model is as good as a frontier model for responding on a signal threat with you which requieres basic tool calling.

A local model is as good as a frontier model of writing a joke.

A local model is as good as a frontier model at responding to an email.

Not sure what needs to be said often enough, no one without a clue would play around with local model setup and would compleltly ignore frontier models and their capabilities?!