Any exchange of higher fixed costs for lower marginal costs (or other benefit) is a tradeoff.
This is a tradeoff that was/is massively beneficial, but it’s still a tradeoff.
Saying "Quality is always a trade-off" implies you can't actually make things better over time. I would accept something like "You can always trade off of the quality you are capable of producing to reduce costs", but the point is that capability can in fact change, and thus there are ways to improve quality that may not be a trade off (because they also improve the business/system along other dimensions). Even simple little things like aligning a process with the intended outcome can reduce costs while improving quality, you don't have to invent a revolutionary method of manufacturing.
Those trade-offs (higher fixed costs in exchange for lower marginal costs and higher quality) can be wildly beneficial overall but finding large Pareto improvements against every dimension is rare in anything even remotely mature.
That's a pretty huge assumption.
For instance, compare firearms prior to replaceable parts to firearms after.
Better, cheaper, easier to make (because craft was replaced with process). Some up front cost, but absolutely not a trade off, it was a huge advancement.
Of course modern process control does more or less let you relax conformance rules to reduce cost, but it's farcical to call sacrificing reasonable conformance "quality".
Arguably, the idea that quality is obviously a trade off and you can make money by letting it slide is one of the sources of rot in our society.