>Can you really prevent people from getting cheaper products forever?

Do you even want cheap products? We're all trapped in low-quality-product hell together, and some of us have realized we'd be less frustrated and less poor with something at least not-quite-so-low-quality.

If people could have realized that sooner, and if there had been some vision or political will at the top, stopping this would've been a matter of very boring policy decisions. It wasn't inevitable. Containerization might have made it easier, but it didn't make it irresistible.