They’re not far behind, unless you mean for “vibe coding”. And for probably 85% of queries that people use LLMs for, you can’t even really perceive the difference between frontier and local.

They will eventually catch up, that’s the hope to avoid a techno feudalism in which too much power is in too few hands.

Yes, but you don’t always want the power/expense of these models for the task at hand. A hammer is good enough to push a nail inside a wall. Save the nail gun for when you are building a house.

It's a trade off.