Very informative article, but I'd say all of this is in favor of OpenRouter, not against it. It gives you full flexibility, not just of models, but of providers. That's the offer!
It reads to me an argument for self hosting, maybe a less capable model to deal with smaller compute resources, but when starting to use that model and inference software to build a benchmark you can easily rerun when you change things to observe the impact of the change.
Maybe that’s a similar level of diligence but they feel different to me.