I wouldn't worry about hardware.

I've run the latest local models over the last year, including the recent Qwen 3.6 30B A3B, on a 9yo GTX 1080 and 32G RAM I have lying around[0]. If I can do that I don't think hardware will be a problem for you in the near term. The only updates I've needed were to Llama.cpp when a new class of model was released.

[0]: In my case, I want to see how local models perform on limited hardware, sacrificing context size and intelligence compared to SOTA models, so I have to really limit my expectations.