Local LLMs are pretty powerful and useful for me personally, and the best compute I have locally is a an RTX2060. I certainly have no paid AI subscriptions.

Obviously depends what you're doing, and not suitable for everyone, but it's an unhelpful generalisation to say AI in its current form is purely a paid product subscription.

Effectively it is. I hear relatively very few people talking about self-hosting it, or even just using one of those GPU rental services. It's all about claude, openai, gemini, if you haven't tried this week's model revision you can't complain, and so on.