At least in the electronics sector, there are contract manufacturers in the west that are happy to deal with small-to-medium-volume production runs.
Their websites will sometimes make them sound a bit aloof, making out they're big and high tech and expensive, but that's just marketing. If an electronics contract manufacturer says they work in aerospace, defence and security, medical, oil and gas and their website has photos of jet fighters and operating theatres? What they really mean is they're set up for production runs as small as a few hundred items, they're happy to deal with a bit of bureaucracy on your end, and they'll guarantee they won't cut corners (like substituting components with cheaper or more easily available ones) unless you tell them to.
A catch, of course, is the minimum orders involved. Automated assembly machines may have the same running costs regardless of the wages of the country they're in - but those machines need to be set up and reconfigured when changing between orders. I don't know what wizardry lets PCBWay offer surface mount PCB assembly for $30 for 20 boards, but you can't match it while paying western skilled worker wages. So if you ask a western contract manufacturer for <300 boards, the price will be substantially more expensive than Chinese manufacturing.