It mostly hurts people in countries with weak purchasing power. DS was the main game in down for them.

Personally, I don't think we've seen the total end of dirt cheap LLMs, it's just a frontier lab doesn't want to be in business of serving half the world.

It seems frontier labs want to sell Ferraris at Ferrari prices, when the mass market is for Hondas.

You certainly don't need Fable to code up a basic web app, any more than you need a Ferrari to go grocery shopping.