Your comparison is wrong
It's not an expensive car vs. any car.
It's car vs. no car.
It's not an expensive car vs. any car.
It's car vs. no car.
The comment I replied to said "I need Claude because it's better than no AI.
That's like saying "I need the Porsche because it's better than no car".
Making a "car vs no car" argument is not an argument for an expensive car. Making an argument for an expensive car, requires both car vs no car, and expensive car vs any car. This is what I was pointing out above.
I agree it's incomplete what I wrote; you were right to call it out.
When you as an individual are getting tens of thousands of dollars of value from a $100 item and someone says there's a slightly-worse version for $1 but can't tell you if you'll find it slightly worse or noticeably worse.. you have to stop what you're doing to evaluate them, pay switching costs etc etc. so the cost difference is less than $99 and might actually be negative, and the difference in margin after paying switching costs is negligible.
So your rational response is to investigate to lower the stakes - but even performing the investigation eats into the time you're spending getting your tens of thousands of dollars of value.