Unless you can run the LLM locally, on a computer you own, you are now completely dependent on a remote centralized system to do your work. Whoever controls that system can arbitrarily raise the prices, subtly manipulate the outputs, store and do anything they want with the inputs, or even suddenly cease to operate. And since, according to this article, only the latest and greatest LLM is acceptable (and I've seen that exact same argument six months ago), running locally is not viable (I've seen, in a recent discussion, someone mention a home server with something like 384G of RAM just to run one LLM locally).
To those of us who like Free Software because of the freedom it gives us, this is a severe regression.
Self-hosting has always have a lot of drawbacks compared with commercial solutions. I bet my self-host file server has worse reliability than Google Drive, or my self-host git server has worse number of concurrent user than github.
It's one thing you must accept when self-host.
So when you self-host LLM, you must either accept a drop in output quality, or spend a small fortune on hardware