The real question is how much compute do you need. With LLMs getting popular, so is compute. That's the real win for non-LLM technologies. The sheer availability of GPU capacity. Yes, it's expensive, but time in a GB300 supercomputer isn't even possible if they don't exist.
Alexnet succeeded for many reasons but a big reason is that computers got good enough to apply those algorithms and techniques in practice. Outside of LLMs, what new AI/ML systems await us in the future? The LLM bubble popping, if it ever does, is going to leave us with supercomputer capacity going unused and available for cheap, meaning experiments that were once infeasibly expensive become practical. I can't afford $10 million to run a weather simulation, but at $1,000 for the same amount of compute, a lot more experimentation becomes practical.