They just mean this part: "where I upgrade hardware in order to upgrade my ai as an alternative to an expensive subscription."

Upgrading local hardware will remain the more expensive alternative to the subscription regardless what the relative cost of running the models themselves are. If the local hardware to do so becomes affordable then the subscription will be even more affordable, not expensive.

At least for these kinds of mega tasks. For more micro task we will always end up with unutilized local compute we already purchased which will be "free" since we already paid for non-AI reasons (e.g. a gaming GPU while not gaming).