* Since 1970 the US has been printing money and dumping it into asset markets. This makes it easier to make money in finance
* US industrial policy has been to squeeze manufacturing talent, especially with environmental policy, which means it moves to foreign industrial hubs.
Those 2 factors alone mean that manufacturing can't compete as a cash cow. It is rather obvious at this point that the big winners in the US are not going to be manufacturers. What is necessary to achieve success is to have a good-enough story for why the Fed should give you money, be that access to the bond market and the Fed's belief that pumping money into the bond market generates wealth or a good reason why the Fed should bail you out when you go bankrupt (Silicon Valley bank, the '08 crisis, etc). How is a manufacturer supposed to get in on that in the same way the banks do? This has surely been clear enough to the people involved since the mid 90s.
You're also looking at a period (1940-1980) when every other industrial power had just had their factories demolished in WWII, so the US was in an unusually advantaged position to make money from manufacturing.