Has nothing to do with bending the knee. The executive order literally changed the official name of the Gulf in the U.S. This situation is ridiculous, but it is the new U.S. government that you need to complain about, not the people implementing or deferring to their decisions.
Yes. You still need similar ones if you want to run the models really fast, but not nearly the same amount or cost. That’s how people run LLMs on their laptops. You don’t even need a GPU, a multi-core CPU is sufficient, just not very fast at it.