> The point of local models is privacy, offline use, and maybe no guard rails.

But also, control and consistency. A local model cannot be changed out under your feet like an API model can be.

Points are starting to be made in favor of value, to the contrary of what you are affirming. Specifically because the new open weights models lower the TCO of hardware in an environment where new open weights were previously thought to be a thing of the past.

There is for $/creativity/token. LLM sampling settings are poorly supported even in open source serverless providers but are the single best lever you have for getting better outputs in regards to creativity (and quality for long context or highly quantized models).