It's not a smell. Why should these developers rebuild a core piece of their stack every few months. Switching out a model requires a new round of testing and validation when we should be able to rely on a piece of software the behave the same way since the last time we touched it.
This is how development looks like for many years now, constant rewrite on the horizon. I think LLM development hype surpassed Blockchain and JS frameworks craze of decade ago.
Its almost a given considering how fast this field moves. Also, what kind of workflow structure would someone have that a single specific model is the only one that would perform acceptably?
It's kind of the same problem with cloud in general (though that moves much slower).
If you want to be sure to be in control, then host it yourself
> Why should these developers rebuild a core piece of their stack every few months?
That's what they signed up for when established a hard dependency on an subscription online-only LLM model.