Sorry, I side with GP. Just because you don't want to use Llama/GPT because of cost, the middle-ground of DistilBERT etc (which can run on a single CPU) is a much more sensible cost/benefit tradeoff than VADER's decade old lexicon-based approach.
I can't really think of many NLP things that are one-decade old and don't have a better / faster / cheaper alternative.