> Kind of funny to read this, now that the practice is no longer a fantasy. I'm thinking of devs who have outsourced their jobs, and Amazon/Etsy sellers who simply resell/drop-ship goods from Alibaba.

One of the issues with being a middleman without a moat is that there's downward pressure on your margin over time until you are squeezed out of the market.

Given the amount of ads I get encouraging people to become a Amazon drop-shipper, I assume that making money doing that has got hard enough that selling shovels became more profitable.