Does pi work well with non frontier models too? how well does 'just ask Pi to build it' work?

Mario explicitly calls out that Pi is meant to work with frontier models -

"Trust the model - frontier models have been RL-trained up the wazoo, they inherently understand what a coding agent is"

and thats what he uses (Opus), and so does every single youtuber.

how many people use it with cheaper open source chinese models? or local models for normal people - ie 16GB vram max, no $5k gpu or 128GB mac ultra.

does the advice repeated every single time, 'just ask pi to build it', work with those?