The real scary thing is we're down to TSMC and Samsung who can now hit the latest node; that seems to be the problem - and the cost of building fabs is insane; it looks like we really need to do research into cost.
Profit oriented companies take those cost savings and choose to drive further down the technology stack (to more complex and expensive nodes), where there are fewer competitors that have enough profits to build competing production lines.
Moore's law is almost our friend here. Being at 3nm instead of 16nm is decreasingly important.
Is anyone doing ~16nm microprocessors besides Samsung/TSMC/Intel/GloFo? I wouldn't call it "cheap and easy" if only they can do it.
(After a quick Google, it seems that China's state-owned SMIC is also starting to do ~16nm, but that's all I could find, unless you mean memory and not processors).