A lot of use cases are cost-limited. Dalle3 makes great images but costs $0.12 per image so it would get extremely expensive at scale (1k generations is already 120$). The cost is by gpu time, the faster you can generate it the cheaper it is. We can get images under 250ms now, which is fast enough to fit in a web request.
Some use cases might be generating profile pictures or banners for users or unique profile pictures for bots in online games. Discord, steam, social media, whatnot, you could just type what you want your profile picture to be and make it on the fly. They're small, aren't expected to be extremely high quality, and cheap enough.
Testing on https://fastsdxl.ai/ - "high quality profile picture of a cartoon cat holding a Bouquet of flowers"
To be clear it's not perfect, but this is a fairly complex prompt and I find the majority of seeds would be "good enough" for thumbnail profile pictures. I think we're almost there for "cheap good enough" usecases.