There is a lot of reason to be excited about local-first and how it could enable much lower costs to build useful apps (both in terms of money and skills). AI will certainly spur that on.

But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term.

There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.