it was people who drove US production over seas. Consumers were always free to choose locally made products. They didn't, they chose cheap.

I can only think of lame examples I'm sorry but there is this silly trend where careful expert design is replaced with letting the end user decide. To me this is just a sign of incompetence. The expert needs to carefully craft into the product what the user wants but only after careful examination. The lame examples would be to let the driver design the car, the passenger the aircraft or the patient the surgery room etc

The story as told above on how production moved to cheap labor countries, jobs were lost as well as purchase power has a weird continuation where the decline of purchase power scales down production and makes life harder for the cheap laborer therefore more fragile. We shift from [the absurd] putting the consumer in charge of the economic decisions to having the "choices" made by (or more like making the results depend on-) people all the way at the bottom of the food chain. We are pretty much left collectively hoping that they can keep up with our unreasonably demanding demands.

I'm not even complaining that we are squeezing people to hard. I have issues with a system that can just abruptly stop - entirely! Sure, I want cheaper products but I have no idea what kind of risks we are taking. I should not be the one to decide. I would rather have a large group of highly trained professionals calculate the risks and present them in a way we might understand. Make me a map of the [proverbial] meteor strikes and the global economic consequences. What parts of the show can go on if ingredient X is taken out of the soup?

(edit: Ofc there is more than cheap labor pushing localized specializations which increase efficiency and decrease resilience)

In this specific situation that's glossing things over as well. I would have chosen locally made except intel completely stalled their progress for years. In my recent upgrade I went with a TSMC (I believe) made AMD chip because it had better access to SSDs and PCI bus and cores that I couldn't get in an intel chip AND better prices. It's hard to buy local if local companies in fast evolving products are going to sit on their laurels.