It's really wild to me that there isn't a market out there for smaller chip manufacturers at larger feature scales to still do production orders in that price r

It's really wild to me that there isn't a market out there for smaller chip manufacturers at larger feature scales to still do production orders in that price range or cheaper even. Or, if there are, they're hard to find and get access to. Lots of chips in use today are still not anywhere near the tiny end of the scale, and they're clearly still being manufactured somewhere, but it's like economies of scale have somehow worked against price in IC manufacturing in some ways (but obviously not others: per-feature-count is obviously much more cost effective now).