The US has always done high end manufacturing. The difference from the 70s is that it requires a lot fewer humans. Manufacturing output in the US is up ~75% from 1998-2017:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...

Yet employment is down ~4 million people in the same period:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

Edit: Here's a FRED blog post talking about the same thing: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/12/manufacturing-is-gro...