These articles are written by people who have no idea what they are talking about and have never built anything, much less anything in the physical world before.
The article doesn't distinguish between making parts and assembly. Making parts was mostly mechanized decades ago. The article talks about 3D printing in metal, which is a nice technology but way too slow to be used to bang out consumer products.
Assembly is still tough to automate. If you want automated assembly, you usually have to design things so that the parts go into place with little or no fuss. Vertical assembly is common, where everything is placed with a straight-down move. This goes way back, to the first cheap mass-produced clocks, where there's a baseplate with pins sticking out of it, you just drop on the gears in the right order, and it all comes together.
They mention Bright Machines. Their site is heavy on the hype, weak on the machine specs.[1] They sell some kind of robotic assembly cell. So do many other companies. Sony had a nice one thirty years ago for making the Walkman. It's not clear what Bright brings to the party. More software integration, probably; they talk about that a lot.
There are some new results from MIT on assembly planning.[2] This is kind of cute. They start with a game-type physics model of the assembled item and figure out how to take it apart. That's reversed into an assembly plan. Joint work from MIT, Texas A&M, and Autodesk.
It's surprising how much manual work is involved in assembling a mobile phone. It's a high-volume product with a modest number of parts, the ideal case for automation. Many early US-made mobile phones were assembled automatically. They were stacks of boards that just had to be dropped onto alignment pins and pressed together. Newer phones have tiny flat cables and connectors all over the place.
Most automated assembly lines involve a huge amount of custom tooling. It's not a few robots with standard tools.
The state of the art in robotic assembly is far worse that you'd think it would be. And that's after half a century of work on the problem, all the way back to McCarthy in the 1960s.
[1] https://www.brightmachines.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Br...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/automated-way-assemble-thousands-o...
The problem is that some of the ignorant writers and readers don't recognize their own ignorance, and are in a position to make corp & govt policy based on that ignorance.
Then, we all pay.