Huh, you're right. I expected 24-inch-long PCBs to be quite a bit more expensive, but even 4-layer boards at those sizes are still available at discount prices. I guess such thin boards could be used to fill in edges of mixed-order panels? It does make me wonder why they say "the array" was $700. Maybe assembly was extremely expensive

It doesn't seem they weren't really able to benefit from it all that much, though: half of them arrived defective, and they had to do quite a lot of debugging to fix them.

(OP here) the $700 was for 50 arm boards and 5 hub boards, fully assembled and shipped including all the parts (enough for 2 full arrays, with some spares). $350 @ qty 2 is pretty good, considering just the microphones is ~$100 for each array!

Unfortunately the assembly/DFM didn't work out well, but with some better design and foresight it should be much less work/wiring compared to wiring them manually.