I feel like i've made an expensive mistake (?)

I picked up a M3 Pro MacBook Pro last year with 18GB unified memory (country fees/import taxes made it extra pricey, around 3000 dollars). My day job is mostly front-end dev and sometimes I edit 4k videos with DaVinci for my clients and I justified the spend because I also wanted to run AI locally for code assist and small experiments, but I can only run small/quantized LLMs and they’re… imprecise and slow. Now I’m sitting here feeling like I paid a premium for something that isn’t delivering what I hoped, but I couldn't spend 10 thousand dollars. Now I'm on a ChatGPT Plus Subscription. Is 18GB simply the wrong tier for most tasks and for the future? I'll stick with using the MBP strictly as a dev machine and push the AI stuff to the cloud. Just stings a bit after the country markup.