Everyone focuses on the frontier models, and they act like everything else is useless. The gap between say, Qwen 3.8 and the frontier models is not as large as you assume, and things on the local front have made significant gains in the past year. That is WHY Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. are worried. They NEED customers to pay top dime for top performance, but if you can spend 95% less money for 95% of the performance of the latest, bleeding edge model from Anthropic, you know which one you'd pick. Most folks don't need that extra 5-10%, especially since the cheaper models will catch up anyway.
Are you sure that AI hasn't just saturated your personal benchmark? Maybe you're just not asking it to do things which showcase its full capability. Open-source models will catch up for any given use case, but the frontier is interesting because of the possibility it will keep opening up new applications.