I'm not sure if it's that simple. Many space-intensive DIY hobbies are on the retreat simply because more people are moving into cities or very dense suburbs where you have no practical opportunity to, say, build a woodworking shop. Metalworking was even more severely impacted, for obvious reasons.

Also, long before mail-order offshore manufacturing, people have been lured away from most of this by the promise of 3D printing. Every other techie I know owns a 3D printer. Most have not made anything interesting with it because they soon learn that the real difficulty is materials science and 3D design. But as a nerd, it's the thing you're supposed to own. In contrast, I know maybe four people in the SF Bay Area who are into woodworking, metalsmithing, CNC, or stuff like that.

I don't see mail-order prototyping as a conspiracy... it's more of a culmination of the DIY community chasing the mirage they were sold on in the early 2010s. I still remember the HN claims: home manufacturing revolution! It's the beginning of a brand new economy, why would anyone buy anything anymore when you can just click "print"... with some amusing parallels to how some folks now talk about building your own software with AI.

The mail-order stuff isn't evil insofar that it may allow some people to make things they couldn't make before. On the flip side, it's a very inefficient way to learn, so I think it will reduce hardware literacy among those who could afford a garage workshop.

FWIW, I think the same goes for AI-assisted hardware design. On one hand, I see people who otherwise wouldn't be DIYing getting into DIY: "I asked Claude and it one-shotted this rectangular enclosure for me, it's amazing!", "Claude made this RP2350 breakout board for me, how cool is that". But I also see established DIYers getting a degree of brain rot.