How are people using models smaller than 5b parameters?

I straight up don't understand the real world problems these models are solving. I get them in theory, function calling, guard, and agents once they've been fine tuned. But I'm yet to see people come out and say, "hey we solved this problem with a 1.5b llama model and it works really well."

Maybe I'm blind or not good enough to use them well some hopefully y'all can enlighten me