For a mechanical approach to this, see the "Gingery" books which start with the basics of investment casting in the first volume, then using castings to make a lathe in the second (operating on the premise that a lathe is the only tool in a machine shop which can replicate itself), then using the lathe to make the balance of tools needed in a machine shop.
Well no, civilizations like the Maori are the exception, not the norm. Rigid class roles and specialization have featured prominently in essentially every Eurasian civilization from Egypt to Han China, which held the bulk of humanity and uts developments. Nor did questions of individual happiness matter, what concerned people at the times were questions of martial duty or religious worship.
And most people lived outside civilization entirely. They had very diverse lifestyles, but we can make some generalizations. Even when they didnt leave diaries for us to read, we can infer that they had much less specialization, both from economic principles and from archaeological evidence.
It's certainly true that people in civilizations are, and have always been, focused on martial duty, and everyone everywhere is concerned with religious worship, though they may call it something else for social reasons. But people have always been strongly interested in individual happiness, even in civilizations. The Buddha founded one of the most important religions 2500 years ago on the basis of individual happiness, to the point that after he died, one of the most contentious issues among his followers was whether holy people had any duty to help other people achieve happiness as well, the origin of the Mahayana bodhisattva vows. Epicurus's philosophy and Marcus Aurelius's writings are also centered on the pursuit of individual happiness, as is much of Plato and of course the Mohists. Even religions and philosophies that preached lifelong duty and sacrifice above all else, like Christianity and Islam, offer it as a path to individual happiness in the afterlife.
Economic productivity is an important means to happiness, because it sucks to go blind or subsist on soft foods because you can't get the necessary medical and dental treatments. And it's terrible to never see your parents again because you don't have the material means to visit them. But there's a point of diminishing returns beyond which sacrificing more of your happiness for continued economic gains amounts to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The Little House on the Prairie books fictionalize the childhoods of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder in the US in the late 19th century. They expected their readers, whose grandparents had grown up in similar conditions, to believe that one or more of their parents knew how to shoot a bear, build a house, dig a well, poultice wasp stings, cast bullets, fertilize and grow crops, make cheese, whitewash walls, drive horses, run a business, read a book, play the fiddle, dance a jig, sing, keep bees, clear fields in forests, harvest honey, spin thread, weave cloth, thresh wheat, and many other activities. There were "store-bought" goods produced by the kind of specialization you're talking about, but Laura's family had a few durable goods of that sort (Pa's rifle and ax, the family Bible) and mostly they just did without.
More recently the Lykov family survived 40 years of total isolation from society, missing World War II completely, but did suffer some heartbreaking losses in material standard of living because they didn't know, for example, how to make ceramic or iron. Agafia Lykova is still living there on her parents' homestead, nearly a century later.
Specialization is indeed very efficient, but that answers the questions, "What can I do for others?" and "How can we survive?" Historical answers bespeaking specialization are archived in many of our surnames in the West: Cooper, Fuller, Goldschmidt, Herrero, Nailer, Roper, Molnar, and, of course, Potter.
But for those questions to matter, we also need to answer the questions, "How can I be happy?" and "How can we be happy?", and for thousands of years it has been at least widely believed that devoting your entire self to specialization runs counter to those goals—among other things, because it can open doors to the kinds of exploitation, unfreedom, and insecurity the article is lamenting. And sometimes regional specialization leads not to prosperity for every region but to impoverishment, and regaining the lost skills is the path out of the kind of abysmal poverty that produces regular famines; that's why there's a charkha on the Indian flag.
TI was no exemplar here; you can't even write your own machine code to run on the TI-99/4A, but the situation with Nest is in many ways far worse. I think it's worth distinguishing between situations where someone chooses not to learn about, modify, or repair artifacts, and situations like these where they are not permitted to learn, especially when the prohibition is established in order to exploit them economically, as in both the TI case and the Nest case, or as in medieval guilds.
Some specializations are thousands of years old; tin mining in Cornwall supported much of the Bronze Age, and silicosis was already known as an occupational disease of potters in Classical times. But 80 hours a week breaking rocks in a tin mine is not a path to human flourishing, nor to economic prosperity for the person doing it. Neither is buying thermostats you aren't allowed to understand. We shouldn't idealize it just because it's profitable.