Is a high-end private local LLM setup worth it?

Hello, I’ve been scrolling through a lot of posts, reading personal experiences, setup advice, and replies to beginner questions from people like me. LLMs really seem like a revolution. But at the same time in every post there is issues: they’re expensive; even if you’re willing to spend serious money, they still seem hard to set up properly; and in the end, even very expensive local setups still don’t seem to match the latest Claude or GPT versions, especially in terms of speed and token throughput.