Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea.
Or I make sourdough bread and it would be very impractical/uncompetitive to start selling it unless I scaled up to make dozens, maybe hundreds, of loaves per day. But it's absolutely far better than any bread you can find on any supermarket shelf. It's also arguably better than most artisanal bakeries who have to follow a production process every day.
This has never been true for "artisanal" software. It could be used by nobody or by millions. This is why the economic model OP proposes falls apart.
I think automobiles are a bad example: I'd trust the reliability and quality of a mass produced Toyota or Honda over a hand-made Ferrari. (Of course there are bad mass produced cars as well.)
But reliability isn't the only measure of quality.
I don't think this is true in general, although it may be in certain product categories. Hand-built supercars are still valued by the ultra-wealthy. Artisanal bakeries consistently make better pastries than anything mass produced... and so on
Take this for example:
``` Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. ```
Industrial systems allow for low quality goods, but also they deliver quality way beyond what can be achieved in artisanal production. A mass produced mid-tier car is going to be much better than your artisanal car.
Scale allows you not only to produce more cheaply, but also to take quality control to the extreme.