Brother, and I say this with all the respect in the world. You are living under a rock (at least a digital rock) take a look at the RE of games or the stuff people are doing. Cost is not an issue for these thing. Groups of people pooling together their token budgets to do this.
I agree. I code a lot, a lot! And maybe my code is shitty, but yeah, I burn a lot of tokens, and I couldn’t do it without Chinese models. I’m just a random dev in the middle of nowhere. And I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything with my setup at all.