Virtually everything is CNC now. Yet it's the people who used to run manual equipment that become really valuable for design and fabrication of tooling and fixtures.
What was worse was using bogus environmental laws to kill plating and coating businesses.
Most of my career was making jet engine, rocket engine, wings, and medical devices. We had our own coating shop because all of the outside ones went out of business or were bought by the prime contractors. Every blade root or vane foot was coated with exotic no stick coatings, tips were coated with cbn, and the material combinations later on used electron beam or plasma to deposit high temp coatings. crazy world. I’m amazed my lungs didn’t coated as well.