The shifting sands of commercial models or pay-per-use managed models are just really not appealing to a lot of people.

Most come with huge privacy concerns, total costs and availability are impossible to forecast very far out, and the specific behavior of frontier models in particular is not something anybody can rely on as those are subscription products that are subject behavior on their publisher's whims (whether from changing system prompts, new "safeguards", retired models, forced "updates", new regulations, etc).

It's quite hard to put a price on all that, and as more people find local models productive enough or develop curiosity to explore models, training, or harness-crafting in their own ways, the marginal cost of buying some shop hardware just sort of disappears into the budget noise for plenty enough people.