It's a little bit of that and a little bit of the fact that there's an innate conservatism to the gun community, and I don't mean the political kind. I just mean that there's a general belief that everything's in constant decline, that the old ways and old days and old things were better.
It's easy to do because of survivorship bias and the tendency for people, as they get older, to have rosy memories of the times when they were young and in their prime.
Listen to the old guys at the gun show talk about how wonderful Detroit cars were back in the day, when the reality is that even before the quality slump of the Seventies & Eighties, a car was used up at 100k miles...provided it hadn't already rusted away to nothing.
People love talking about 19th Century revolvers and they mean Colts and Smiths and Merwin Hulberts, when the fact is that the hardware stores of the Old West were full of
janky spur-trigger suicide specials that have also mostly rusted away to nothing.
Manufacturers are always going to try to maximize profit and
QC is one of the easiest places to do it, especially when you have to compete on price with some Austrian company churning out guns that cost next to nothing to make.