That sort of thing did happen in the past though. Complicated engineering operations scaled up in months and years. Immediate post war era saw massive buildout of university engineering departments, more PhDs minted than ever before.

The fact we have so much latent demand and aren't getting these benefits right now is depressing. Where is our silico-industrial buildout? Why is our federal government cutting unversity research funding, and not expanding it to train more PhDs to run in demand fabs? We are being led by short thinking greedy assholes is why.