[greggsy]

This completely ignores the maker boom of the last 15 years. 3D printers makes tinkering incredibly cheap, and complex electronic components and tooling are unimaginably easy to acquire through AliExpress. There are 28 million repositories on GutHub alone - if only a small proportion of those aren’t blank or forks, there’s still a huge number of unique and novel ideas being developed.

There’s a healthy number of blogs, tweets, and repo comments and communities (HN even) helping people understand these technical areas, drastically reducing the barrier to entry.

There certainly is a lot of protectionism putting a damper on things in many areas, but you’re talking about mass-production, which isn’t necessarily required in all cases, especially when there’s so many alternatives equivalents available these days.