As someone who has walked those production lines, and helped coordinate things around them, I agree. But I don't think it's quite as difficult as you'd like to portray. It's difficult in a place like the United States, because it costs money that can be more efficiently spent elsewhere (for now!). But it's not that difficult.
Yes, it's more difficult (from a technological and human coordination standpoint) than a relative few people sitting down and spending months writing a new software package. But I don't think there's this orders-of-magnitude gulf here, and we should also account for the mental/intellectual costs. It is much more mentally taxing to build a non-trivial software package than it is to set up a hardware supply chain and manufacturing facility. That's not to say that the latter is easy, but it's not particularly intellectually challenging, at least not in a comparable way.
Programming and setting up production are simultaneously complex and complicated. Once you get past a certain level of precision or scale, management in either case becomes more of an art form than a science.
It's possible to build a manufacturing line that results in humans on the moon, but that line also depends on software. In then end there is no pure production chain any more. Margaret Hamilton saw to that. 8)
Setting up a production line is just as tricky as anything you've seen while debugging.
We programmers are incredibly privileged.