The problem is people don't want to admit what needs to be done before it's too late.
When the gas crisis hit, it put enough money into the Japanese car makers that their next generation of cars weren't just more fuel efficient than what Detroit was producing, they were actually competitive on multiple levels.
Suddenly the Big Three had to compete, but there was a problem. They had promised their workers wages and benefits they could only provide when they didn't have viable foreign competition. More competition meant lower volumes and lower margins.
There are only two options in that circumstance. Either everyone tightens their belt or the companies fail. But nobody wanted to tighten their belt. The unions wouldn't give back what they negotiated during the time when the American automakers had no competition. So the companies slowly failed, and with them the region.
The alternative might have been that most cars were still made in Detroit, and people there made middle class wages, just not upper middle class wages. But they chose bankruptcy and unemployment over accepting that, and that's what they got.