Nope, I’ve long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it’s still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.

That really is the least of the worries, there just isn’t the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn’t feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.

Some crappy product manager found some agreeable “tech enthusiasts” and/or worded their research questions in such a way that made it seem like this would be a net positive to the sales/profit of the product.

The engineers who had to design this terrible product were probably making jokes about it all the time.