The more recent Chinese models are no longer heavily limited by context size. It can easily fit in RAM on a prosumer laptop. (You can also use swap space to extemd that, since context is only written to once per inference, thus a relatively mild wear-and-tear concern.)

You’re right, and it feels like these people saying otherwise either don’t use these tools professionally (and therefore can’t tell a difference between local/cloud models) or literally just haven’t tried running local models

As soon as I can buy hardware for less than 5k that runs an opus 4.6+/5.5 model locally I will do it instantly