With international supply chains, labor hours naturally flowed down to those places with cheapest labor, while maintenance hours (performed in higher standard o

With international supply chains, labor hours naturally flowed down to those places with cheapest labor, while maintenance hours (performed in higher standard of living countries) were chopped to basically nothing. Maintenance is where standards get enforced. While it might be possible to dictate standards to a factory in Shenzhen, the odds they're going to be built to spec is vanishingly small. So, as we've seen, far easier to just have the overseas factory build the assembly, then you can reject the nonfunctional assembly, or, better yet, have the consumer find the nonfunctional units directly. The upside of this is you can make all the components completely bespoke to the application, tightening tolerances and (with the potential of) increasing overall reliability. In industries where maintenance still has to happen, you see these general specs still in use. ARINC is one set that I deal with every day - they publish tons - along with many various MIL-STD things.