The lithography is just a step of the process. I'm just a layman but there's a lot of chemistry involved in just the processing of materials like coating and etching the wafers, particle bombardment, etc. Even the conditions and environment in which the lithography is done makes a big difference.

Peripheral knowledge (worked in Taiwan earlier):

I suspect the following might be a big part of the secret sauce:

a) Having a culture where EE work is more prestigeous than software work, leading to smart people going there.

b) Having spent decades on scaling up the national university system for engineering educations, starting from the 80s electronics design/manufacturing boom.

c) Having a low salary level, internationally speaking.

The combination of a large, smart and affordable work force for something like this is pretty hard to beat.

Apparently the machines are pretty hard to replicate, the company (ASML) has had to deal with a couple of corporate espionage cases in the past[0].

[0]: https://nos.nl/artikel/2280228-wat-heeft-de-chinese-overheid... (in Dutch)

Calibration and following working procedures. The lithography machines have endless knobs to tune. It has to be done well to get a decent yield out of a factory.

just having a fancy computer doesn't make somebody a great programmer

TSMC and Samsung are two companies that have competitive technology node in EUV (Intel struggling).

It means they have invented ways to use these machines to print extremely small transistors and that are fast, energy efficient and have good yield (less failures in the process).