I don't find Lego especially expensive. And Lego is way more difficult to manufacture, has very exacting functional requirements and extremely good QA.
I can't say what's more difficult to manufacture - millions of identical bricks that snap together, or a huge range of different, detailed designs which fit snugly together but don't lock.
Just the first thing on the home page: https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/shop/Deathlords-Mortarchs-Ma...
Clearly you are not aware of the extraordinary range of Lego pieces.
Just from a quick search, within a year Games Workshop offer about 3000 different model kits, each of which will contain ~1-4 unique moulded sprues. There seem to be at least 50 new kits each year, possibly 100, otherwise what's available rotates around the older kits.
Lego have produced about 15,000 different sets since 1950, and a huge number of the parts are shared between sets. (That's the whole point of the toy, no?)
Which is an issue because it makes the sets way more difficult to reuse than 30 years ago. Go figure what to build with a random ninjago set except the official model. But that’s another ~~rant~~story.
The stuff they’re putting out these days is really quite good.
The manufacturing isn't easy, sure, but it's more or less a solved problem and not at all reflected in the cost.
So when GP says priced like Lego, they just mean that - priced based on something completely different from the cost of materials, manufacturing, etc.
Micromolding is very hard, and Lego is the best at it.
Lego does not outsource brick making. They tried it out back in 2005 with Flextronics in Hungary and got a painful lesson. Lego runs all their factories themselves now.
I don't think the official Lego China factory products get sold to the US, only Asia?
Nowadays it's kinda irrelevant to the greater point anyways, because some of the knock off factories make parts that are just as good. (Some knock off factories push out terrible QC)