The entire analogy is flawed though, and this is why: a market still exists for handmade objects. Factories make cheap clothing/objects, but handmade bags/woodworking are still deeply valued and there are people who still make their living in woodworking and other fields. Factories did bring some professions to near-extinction, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing left of them. In fact, many utilize factory techniques and tools in their work to ease costs, like lathes.
As for COBOL, it was mostly phased out because it’s Hell to program for and other languages like Python allow for faster dev time (for both good and bad). COBOL programmers still exist, and you’re honestly unlikely to fire that COBOL programmer because you need them to maintain mission-critical infrastructure. However, because you’re not actively building new COBOL programs, you also don’t need any more than that one. For compliance reasons it also needs to be a human, because a lot of surviving COBOL code is medical or financial in nature.
Sure the top 0.1% of the profession can survive, that isn't great comfort to the 99.9% that lose their job though.
Now he is in the small and very limited market of handmade leather objects.
Considering all the unemployed former handbag makers, competition would be fierce in that niche market.
Alternative is working in a handbag factory below previous pay grade doing a loosely related job.
It’s not clear if we’ll be given the factory option.
But... it did? It's not like there are lot of horse carriages out there or, for a more recent example, plenty of Cobol developers. Or for a closer example, there used to be plenty of shoemakers when I was young and yet now I know of exactly one.
> The process still exists as-is in its prior form, like the woodcarvers of yesteryear. Nothing that you desire (the process/journey) has been lost. It still exists.
At the risk of stating the obvious: just because I can be a woodcarver as a hobby it doesn't mean it's the same as making a living out of woodcarving because doing something I consider enjoyable for a living is not the same as doing it exclusively as a hobby. If I fire a Cobol programmer knowing full well they'll have to work at their local supermarket until retirement, telling them "you can still program in your free time" will not bring them comfort.