So yes, they can probably afford to have a bunch of people tweak knobs in a factory all day.
But what would prevent this system from being compromised?
Seems pretty easy for an adversary to "inject an exploit in these controllers" by paying a few of them to keep the knobs in the wrong position for a bit more time than strictly necessary, or to flip a switch earlier/later than ideal.
Auditing this is seems worse than checking the code for an old-style, non-networked, PLC.
In the US, I can’t afford a full time maid. In India, I could probably afford 10.
Or more pointedly, in the US you can afford a car far earlier than you can afford a maid. In India, it’s the opposite.
It‘s why, for example, middle class households in the US don‘t have live in maids, because rising living standards made that unaffordable at a middle class income level.
An interesting aspect of poorer economy I’ve noted but haven’t seen anyone discuss otherwise is you can live a much better life being poor in India, than you can in the US — the really low income economy is far healthier (the quality of everything degrades continuously). I’m sure it’s not a novel insight, but I don’t know what others would call it.
In the US you pass under the minimum wage bar of value production and you’re immediately in a tent under an LA bridge — with everyone else ranging from $7.99/hr to $0.01/hr. Of course an economy exists to support them anyways, but it’s largely underground, illegal (bypassing safety and regulations, e.g. selling very old cars; selling cigarettes individually) and actively zoned into oblivion
So the idea might not work for Iran, but it probably would for North Korea.