The picture of silicon industry that you paint is very far from reality. Neither Taiwan nor South Korea are third world countries and baking top chips isn't the same as sewing cotton T-shirts or gathering strawberries under the scorching sun. Instead of "cheaper labor", you need top talent and very high quality equipment. That top talent collects very good salaries.
If chip production was just a matter of money, both China and the U.S. would rule the roost. The real bottleneck is talented and loyal engineers.
Semiconductor engineers salaries in Taiwan could've been as low as $26k-$28k USD back in 2007-2009. Multi-year long PhD "interships" can be unpaid, or completely minimally so.
A chance for an average semi process engineer graduate to survive to doing real RnD was close to 80-100 to 1.
I wonder what the situation looks like today. Probably better, because losing senior engineers in a situation when the field has shrunk to Samsung, TSMC and Intel, would be a huge pain.
The mainland is taking advantage of this to get skilled engineers, as mainland Chinese tech salaries are closer to those in the US. So much so that Taiwan has banned recruiting for mainland jobs: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Taiwan-...
If chip production was just a matter of money, both China and the U.S. would rule the roost. The real bottleneck is talented and loyal engineers.