I'm not saying there's no benefit to using local models. My point is still the same as before: you have to be willing to sacrifice both performance and quality even when just comparing to free models that are available today.
I spent some years in the pharma industry, where AI came really late, as there was (justified) concern that sensitive data might leak - even by accident. Eventually a solution was implemented - it was some kind of open model (they didn't say which) running on-premises.
You couldn't tell these people that this and that powerful model is free or inexpensive, because it's useless to them if it's running on someone else's computer i.e. the cloud.