A common talking point is that the number of people working in engineering is decreasing over time. The implication is that "we are making less", but the real story is that "we are making things more efficiently".

A case in point is agriculture in Australia, where a crop farm might be as big as a thousand acres, whereas its common in SEA for a family to have just one or two acres. The huge scale is enabled by multi-million dollar tractors, drones, huge irrigation systems, etc...

German manufacturing is the same.

Google says that the average farm size in Australia is 10,000 acres. I didn't think they were significantly smaller than the farms in Saskatchewan Canada which average 2,000 acres.