I know that market, and people for that matter don't care, but the environmentalist in me questions the word "needs" in the context of using AI.
I bet when hot and cold running water first came out you would have questioned whether people "needed" that as well.
Plainly it was not a "need" since people managed for thousands of years without it.
This is what progress looks like.
I'd be more OK with it if prices weren't subsidized so much and people actually had to pay to ask opus how to pee, then maybe we would realize we don't need beefier models for everything