It only takes away choice if you use the demo files with the models baked in. There are versions of this under the Releases->Assets that are only the actual llama.cpp OS portable binaries that you pass the model file path to as normal.

Compiling llama.cpp is relatively easy. Compiling llama.cpp for GPU support is a bit harder. I think it's nice this OS portable binaries of llama.cpp applications like main, server, and llava exist. Too bad there's no opencl ones. The only problem was baking in the models. Downloading applications off the internet is not that weird. After all, it's the recommended way to install Rust, etc.