If you need rich outputs, there are tools for that now too.
Let me put it another way - would you want to be Adobe or Figma right now?
And applied to the original point, would you feel comfortable being a SaaS company right now?
So you end up spending the money elsewhere? with exploratory design you can easily spend 10k a month on these models as a company of 1000, thus completely losing any monetary savings. Anyway you look at it, Saas worked because costs were spread out and low enough to not optimize it too much.