Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.
these boards werent consumer producs though. playstations are produced for years with no alterations.... millions of times. i.e. playstation 4 was sold ~100million times. thats most definitely at a scale where you can automate with margins.
Game console manufacturing definitely is low-mix compared to cars, but it's not like they're stamping out spoons: depending on how you count, there were something like 19 revisions to the PS3 motherboard, as Sony worked to reduce chip count and shrink PCB size: https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Motherboard_Revisions
Specifically, in the context of assembly, as long as dimensions and locations of each connector stay the same, it does not really matter for the automated assembly line.
I was trying to clean the dust out of my PS4 a little while ago, and had to browse through quite a few YouTube videos before I found a disassembly tutorial that matched my model.
Years ago I worked for a company that had a PCB production line, and even for relatively low volumes (compared to consumer electronics) they used basically that exact process. The PCBs would be printed elsewhere and delivered in flat stacks, the boards would go through pick-and-place, solder bath, reflow, through-hole, wave solder, sometimes xray inspection, etc. Also had a tour of an Iomega plant when I was much younger with similar processes.
Not sure if NeXT was a pioneer in those techniques, but they seemed standard by the late 1990s and 2000s.
The top tier "chipshooter" style pick and place machines are going our of favour these days.
Their golden days were during the first cellphone boom. Back then, the level of integration was lesser, and you had more discrete components on more smaller boards, and volumes were of course very high during the boom time.
Now, you can have a "dumphone" made with just 30 parts on the pcb, and very few passives.
From my experience over the decade, people running factories came to love having multiple, cheaper mounters, and more lines.
The "superboard" concept is also seem to be waning, as you see more, and more individual boards in products like smartphones. It makes for less manufacturable designs, but additional labour expense is not dramatic.
Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.