My experience is completely different. I've been able to implement a ton of ideas I've had for years using them that I simply did not have the energy to do before. The speed of development is significantly faster when you use them properly.
I've also haven't found no problems with maintaining projects where I use LLMs. I spend the time to design the architecture and structure of the project. This acts as the scaffold, and the LLM simply fills in the implementation details. If anything, I find the code ends up being cleaner because it's now much cheaper to do refactors, and to experiment before you settle on a solution.
The pricing is only an issue for American models. DeepSeek is already making profit, and there is no reason for them to raise prices because they never took on huge amounts of debt they need to pay off while their model continues to become more efficient. On top of that, local models are viable as well now. Qwen 3.8 27b is roughly equivalent to Opus 4.6 from less than a year ago. I fully expect that the trend of models getting smaller and more capable will continue.