Of course, keeping inventory was much more important in those times. However, it’s disingenuous to act like robust American manufacturing had their shit together in any way back then.

I am quite versed in it as an Industrial Engineer, there is a cultural reason Deming was laughed out of American boardrooms and welcomed in Japanese ones from small podunk auto manufacturers nobody had heard of such as Toyota, where the system they developed would go on to form the basis of all modern manufacturing (which took American manufacturers so long to understand that they all went out of business). Even to this day, American auto manufacturing is a joke.

When pull manufacturing is considered a revolutionary concept, robust business does not exist.