What is true is that it gets easier and faster to run local models. With QAT (quantization aware training), turboquant (or similar) K/V compression; what used to be impossible to run is now fairly easy.
I can run gemma4:26b-a4b-qat on my laptop with 20-30 tokens/s with a 256k context window. That was unthinkable just 6 months ago.
So the local models are "OK" for small'ish projects.
But it does not at all(!) compare to the frontier models. For a large project Claude's Opus 4.6+ just work, whereas local gemma tangles itself up, makes weird mistakes, and just can't handle it (for those cases it is faster if I do it myself).
If the trends continues, with 1.58bit QAT models, even better K/V compression, faster multi-token prediction et al, maybe soon it will be comparable.