Comment by quartesixte

That army of “low-skilled” workers are highly skilled machine operators.

CNC programming isn’t generally performed by engineers—it is currently mostly performed by veteran machine operators.

To get enough veteran machine operators who have the skill and talent to program at the level necessary for high-precision consumer goods, you need quite the workforce pool.

And then add in all the other CNC machinists and manufacturing engineers you need for the auxiliary industries (tooling, molding, the machines themselves) and it starts to add up.

Don’t forget every other industry that is competing for this labor pool.