Nothing stops you from downloading the model and hosting it on a cloud virtual machine

Common sense does, but other than that I suppose you're right.

A provider deprecating a model doesn't mean the .gguf file disappears from my computer.

When the weights are publically available (and open to use), then there's a free market for hosting that model at least. That's not independence for me, but it's lack of vendor lock-in.

For some of the open models, there's a list of 20-30 providers of the same model on openrouter for example, as an example of the supply.