what do you mean they don't in practice? you don't believe people and companies are using AI to build their own tools to replace expensive dependencies?

one example i've seen is modders using AI to bring back older games that ip laws are killing. the whole stop killing games movement will be made obsolete soon when modders can simply produce working, open source versions of these games.

and you dont need to run models locally, you just need competition in the provider market. and we can see this in action - go look at how many providers serve deepseek, all at competitive prices.