Pretty much this. I worked at a HW company and we did our board design, bring-up etc all in Taiwan, board production/population, enclosure, power, final asse

Pretty much this. I worked at a HW company and we did our board design, bring-up etc all in Taiwan, board production/population, enclosure, power, final assembly etc all in Shenzhen and firmware/software as global remote but US centric. It wasn't just that it was cheaper, it was faster, more accurate and more flexible. With collocation of everything you need to build HW (i.e all the inputs, parts etc being made in the same place) it was just so much faster not only to do initial product dev but also to spin revisions/iterate. It's going to take a long time for similar density to build up somewhere else to enable to same sort of super rapid HW development cycle.