Then a completely new way of steel production came about. Nothing iterative about it, a completely different set up that came with its downsides but had better economies of scale.
If there is a change to come, it's not by building a bigger fab that has higher capital costs. It's by making the idea of a fab entirely obsolete by finding a way to bypass all the steps involved in the current manufacturing process and producing a slightly inferior product in some way but isn't a multi-month long process with capital costs measured in $10s of billions. Fabless manufacturing was a great boon in its time by changing the business model around fabs but it didn't change the underlying engineering. Somebody, ultimately, owned a fab in the chain.
The real trick will be something that bypasses the whole idea of pure crystal ingots as the core of the process that has to be processed in batches with 100s of steps. Something more continuous and simplified would be revolutionary. Hypothetically, imagine instead of growing a perfect crystal and etching or doping it, you grew an imperfect crystal but that growth was controlled in the direction that got you 80% of the way to the layout of the final design. Or imperfections were embraced and utilised as a feature for randomised bias in AI cores than a flaw that wasn't tolerated.
All of this, hypothetical of course, but my point is even if we are at the end of this fabbing game, the real trick is creating a completely new game entirely.