> There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of thought around “is it even necessary for this three-ton industrial robot to be dynamically reprogrammed from a service center in Stockholm,”

That's because the value proposition is only obvious when you substitute for "Stockholm" a city from one of the countries with cheaper labor.

In my limited experience with Industry 4.0, it smells like a combination of forcing a goldrush to sell shovels (so many players that want to be the platform which connects everything) on one side, and ongoing search to turn capex into opex on the other (that latter thing is a trend in pretty much all industries, though). I think there's enough companies that would happily replace their control systems (and control engineers) with prepackaged control-as-a-service which they don't have to know anything about, supplied by the lowest bidder, to which they can shift any liability if anything happens. This kind of setup does require remote access.