Imo, this is just the tech version of virtue signaling. Everyone knows local models are objectively just worse than frontier/cloud closed source models for most commodity hardware setups, yet people insist on using it because they want to be contrarian or "stick it to the man."

Your experience is average because it _is_ supposed to be average. The people using local models tradeoff taking the moral/technological high ground vs actually using something high quality to get a job done quickly and with high quality, and largely autonomously. They are ok with subpar output because they will handhold the model more, or the (subpar relative to the frontier) outputs are sufficient for their toy use case while being cheap and accessible, with the added benefit of being able to run it on their private data without sending it to a 3rd party.

Almost no one at any job where software is the main economic output is using a local model to code. If you actually require intelligence to get a hard job done, you should just use a frontier model.