Is anyone actually using these small models for general purpose applications? Or are they just used to fine tune into narrowly useful specialized models?

I keep seeing them pass each other on different benchmarks and leaderboards and I can't help but imagine that so many of them are only good at benchmarks and not much else.

I haven't gotten a chance to play with this stuff yet so I have no basis to go off of, but I'd like to hear from anyone who's actually been impressed by any of these small models for general purpose tasks.