I must have explained myself extremely poorly. I spent a fair bit of money ~$1,000 USD running a near SOTA fine-tuned llama model on cloud GPUs for this very particular task.
It's like saying I chose barefoot walking to get to the next town and while admittedly it was a painfull and not pleasant experience, it was free. I did try a helicopter service but that was very expensive for my use case.
People are pointing out you could have used a bicycle instead.
I mean he did use the state of the art for his work, he just checked how much better it actually was in comparison to a much simpler algorithm and thought the cost/benefit ratio to be questionable... At least that's what I read from his comments