It's not so simple. The knowledge hasn't been transferred to future operators, but to process engineers who are kow in charge of making the processes work reliably through even more advanced automation that requires more complex skills and technology to develop and produce.

No doubt, there are people that still have knowledge of how the system works.

But operator inexperience didn't turn out to be a substantial barrier to automation, and they were still able to achieve the end goal of producing more things at lower cost.