Anything done local will likely come at higher cost and at scale with less energy efficiency and commodity, with less possibility to fine tune engineer deeply on wider horizon of issues.

That's never the point of keeping local alternatives though.

Right.

For me this dates all the way back to installing Slackware 1.0 (0.99pl12!) on an offline 486SX rather than just using the internet-connected workstations in the lab.

Here, I already had a Mac that was powerful enough to run a local LLM, so now I do, because I can.