My experience with ethically run (if unethically created) local models has been similar. Lots odd hardware to get slow mediocre answers.

But the biggest reason AI competes with plain old web search is that they’ve enshittified the web search available to us.

Corporate assholes are breaking search to force people to use their centralized harmful AI answer guessers.

We can fight back with Searx. https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Searx