Sure, I can spend $20 and figure it out, but I already pay $40/mo for two ChatGPT subs and that's enough to get me through a month.
Should I spend $20 to see for myself?
Then in december I heard from my co-workers that they were liking Claude better than any other model, and from others online, so I bought myself some Claude for xmas. And I could clearly see that it was better, right away.
That's all I know, only one model to compare with, but the difference was definitely tangible.
There are plenty of free (and also cheap ones) models you can use with just openrouter or kilocode (inexpensive less-shitty Cursor basically, https://kilocode.ai).
With most things these free models are able to achieve great results and similarly to the expensive ones they need oversight and thorough code reviews. These days I'm barely paying anything for tokens monthly.