I fully agree with you guys on a macro-scale. I didn't have this position years ago but now it's a firm position.
But my observation is that no one (read: a significant majority) is financially sovereign (FS), therefore they mis-calculate the time/labor costs and it's economic value/costs.
To think of this another way, if your (financial/material/etc) lives depended the Amish's* jam or chairs (or anything else they make). You can depend on their work, up to a certain scale. But even most software projects don't have this dependability because software is generally repackaged to fit a narrow use-case.
Iff (if and only if) the Amish were to embrace the automation technology, then you could depend on the Amish scaling for whatever you need.
Financial sovereignty is very powerful but the drawbacks are that the team, to do all the needed work, might not be FS. (Hence why I mention the Amish) This FS doesn't scale (this could with the Amish; if they wanted to provide jam to everyone, etc) with the complexity of the problem nor the robustness of the problem being solved. Another important drawback is that those that are FS tend to be myopic to those that aren't (i.e. their market/customers). This problem is pretty big as well. To find a product/service that solves all these criteria is immense and dare I say, improbable, hence my agreement to the two comments above. The simple solution is to try and align with the better alternative that have a positive feedback loop (i.e. monetary gain to improve the work).
* Note: I do understand that Amish charge money for jam/chairs/etc but the cost is tends to be nominal/small.