Should probably mention this as a root comment, but various local image gen models like fooocus [1] run on basically any remotely modern hardware, have phenomenal output quality, and cost basically nothing.
I think companies trying to sell image gen at this point are just banking on ignorance.
At this point, I'm much more interested in seeing releases for models chasing down prices on "good enough" to unlock new use-cases than I am SOTA.
I've been using Grok Imagine V1 in prod for months now as its quality for my use-case is already more than enough.