For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
US manufacturing is expensive because wages are high, but also because we focus on the high end work that pays more . Even the small machine shops I used 10 years ago for small scale production runs are no longer interested in doing any small batch work. They have more contract work from big companies than they can handle, and the big companies pay more and have higher order quantities.
If you’re a shop or a factory in the US you’re never going to take some small orders for a grill brush from some YouTuber who doesn’t have any expertise in marketing grill brushes. Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
The US manufacturing industry moved on to better paying, more stable contracts because they could.
They have no incentive to do niche things for small time YouTubers who won’t be generating repeat business.
Even the small machine shops I know now have more high paying work than they can handle. They’re just interested in doing some niche temporary work in a race to the bottom with another country that can pay workers a fraction as much and ignore all of the health and safety regulations.