Which could be economics: at industrial scale, the relative cost of the ingredients is much higher than the cost of labor. at smaller scale, the labor cost starts to outweigh. so an industrial manufacturer is more tempted to cut costs on ingredient quality. Even if that quality reduction is primarily in service of variance reduction (i.e., going with a wheat supplier who can guarantee availability in large quantities year round, instead of continuously needing to tweak recipes to work with different wheats).
In many cases, the extra delay between production and consumption of a large industrial manufacturer also leads them to pursue solutions that improve shelf-stability.
I suspect if anything was as elementary as "it's the kneading" they would have figured out a way to mimic the better technique. It's more likely that the logic of the industrial scale process itself is inimical to some of the finer points of producing top-shelf breads.