They really are fantastic for a lot of use cases and I think most people do not need SOTA. When I run that qwen model in my measly 4070 12 GB for my personal email agent that I build and experiment with, I need privacy more than anything else. It does a great job. Even for coding tasks, given you know how to use them instead of dumping a grand plan, it's great.
SOTA can code but can also prove theorems and teach you about music theory or ancient Greece's substrate language or botany. Speaking in tens of different languages. I wonder how many hundreds of billions of parameters can be saved just by removing much of the general knowledge parts while keeping logical and programming abilities the exact same.
Network Bandwidth, Storage space and speed, memory capacity. While all of these were worth optimizing for at a point in history, that point is behind us. It's probably a reasonable expectation that it will eventually be true for VRAM.