Not to criticize the concept of JIT to avoid excessive inventory, but I've always argued that the flipside of JIT is turning every path in the supply chain into a critical path.
I feel like this is the manufacturing equivalent of the financial sector shenanigans back in 08.
A bunch of companies increasing profits by baking in risks into the chain, because the risks of your individual providers failing are independent probabilities, until a pandemic closes them all at the same time.
The obvious difference is that the financial sector was (and is) way bigger than manufacturing.
e.g. microcontrols don't require lots of processing power, and if embedded software wasn't complete shit it would be easy to keep portable so there is supply chain flexibility.
If you have a just-in-time manufacturing operation and your suppliers are more powerful than you are, you're very vulnerable.