Bashing on ollama is totally warranted, since ollama is a UI skin around llama.cpp and that's it. If all you cared about was "I want to run a model and use it via an API" then the only thing it did was give you a GUI to download models (vs browsing HuggingFace yourself and downloading .gguf files yourself) and a GUI with a button labeled "run" (instead of a run.sh or run.bat script launching llama-server).

That's not _nothing_, but it's pretty close to nothing, and for the prosumer crowd it edges towards "just gets in the way".