The issue is that even though most of us have the spare time to hop on a plane and go mine some rare Earth metals ourselves, while tweaking an ARM chip specific

The issue is that even though most of us have the spare time to hop on a plane and go mine some rare Earth metals ourselves, while tweaking an ARM chip specification, in fact when it comes time to building a foundry for it we are too gunshy to lay down $1B-$2B. As Wikipedia states, "Prices for most common pieces of equipment for the processing of 300 mm wafers range from $700,000 to upwards of $4,000,000 each with a few pieces of equipment reaching as high as $50,000,000 each (e.g. steppers). A typical fab will have several hundred equipment items." Well, either that, or full-stack doesn't mean what the author thinks it does :) What does mobile app dev have to do with a full web stack for example :)