Counterpoint: based on a lot of anecdotes here, the most likely people to burn tokens aren’t GenZ but managers using ChatGPT to respond to questions or otherwise as an outsourcing of their job. There aren’t enough GenZ in the workforce to back your claim in my opinion.
Token efficiency where instead of the AI burning money at 1:3 instead of 1:5 isn’t quite a winning argument.
There's the cost to do productive work, and the proportion of work which is actually productive.
GPT5.5 medium is ~20% the cost of Opus and 27% the cost of Sonnet on a task by task basis. That's a material difference.
There's no way managers using LLMs to answer emails are burning tokens at a comparable rate to someone trying to utilize inference in production systems is.