I don't really understand the argument you're making, but just to add a data point:

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is 167 gigabytes from the developer and as a GGUF with no additional quantization. It limps along on my 192GB M2 Mac from several years ago [0]. This model tests better[1] than Claude Opus 4.6 released in February. That's six months ago - what will be available 6 months from now?

https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731/tr...

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-GGUF

So yeah, enthusiasts aren't going to run frontier models on their gaming machines, but a small office could easily justify the $30k - $100k cost to run something like this at high speed. The small company I worked for routinely spent that kind of money on Dec Alphas twenty five years ago, and that's not accounting for inflation adjustment.

And this is completely discounting the advances smaller models are making. You're right that Qwen 3.8 comes in different sizes. However, Qwen 3.8 27B and Qwen 3.6 27B do run on gaming cards, and they're better than the frontier models from twelve months ago.

I have no idea what will happen in the future, but I wouldn't base my guesses solely on the largest open weight models.

[0] Yes, it's unpleasantly slow (5-8 tok/sec)

[1] Yes, benchmarks should be taken with a lot of salt.