A machine might be able to make an objectively better thing, but that’s not what people are paying extra for. It’s the story about a real person applying their skills and effort to make it. Demand for that will likely never cease to exist. I bet it’ll just increase.
It’s a valid comment and a concept that is fussed about everywhere in hand craft circles. I do woodworking and I use a CNC machine sometimes. Woodworkers without a CNC say that’s not woodworking but most who have one say it absolutely is woodworking, because you have to know what you need the wood to be, you have to know how to make the machine do it and you have to know what the limitations are, etc.
I think the concept you’re looking for is mass production or corporate owned production. To me, that’s what differentiates. If a person in their garage is making something using a machine, it’s a lot closer to someone using hand tools than a corporation buying or building machines to crank out things while paying others to operate the machines as cheaply as possible.
20 years ago I used then cutting-edge computer tech to make abstract art images for printing. The printing itself was somewhat of a craft, but ultimately once setup I could produce one, or ten, or thousands of each image if I had buyers for them. A local art gallery encouraged me, invited me to shows where they turned away about 80% of applicants, but the things didn’t sell themselves. The “best” outlet I found was a local restaurant which showed work of local artists on a rotating basis - I got in there for a week and sold one piece at a “profit” if you can call $100 for the effort of framing and hanging five pieces that cost $100 each to produce and bringing four them home when only one sold for $200 a profit.
At first I thought that of course it’s still hand made (I still do) when using a CNC machine (never heard of CNC machines before, so had to read an article about it), and I thought that it’s a completely different case than what I described, but is it?
What I described was inspired by a Danish entrepreneur who got famous for making these small hand made ceramic flagpoles, each hand made and each varied a lot… But she got some exposure in a Danish version of Dragons Den, and suddenly you could buy these ceramic flagpoles in every city. She no longer made the flagpoles herself, but she kept designing new products and taught her employees to make them like she did. They were at that point still hand made, but I think the definition gets a bit blurred, because when do something become mass produced?