I believe you're asking a genuine question. It's not DIY (well, after we've prototyped it's not), these components are elements of goods for sale. Specifically

I believe you're asking a genuine question. It's not DIY (well, after we've prototyped it's not), these components are elements of goods for sale. Specifically the 555 was used as a watchdog. Runs of 5000 are barely enough to get the attention of stateside distributors so long as they arrive with orders for everything else on the board. As to how they're used, someone sticks a reel into a pick-and-place robot that populates the board, and the assembly shuffles into a wave soldering machine for the dirty work. It's very conventional stuff to the extent that $DAY_JOB's factory manages it from a third world-country.