I think this is, above all, a question about manufacturing processes and quality control and active assurance. Today many items including musical instruments are machined and manufactured to a very high reproductive quality at very affordable prices measured in the equivalent of human work hours. But that means that competition between single exemplars essentially ends with the conclusion of prototyping.
With manual mass manufacture, the workers were competing mostly on execution rather than on design, but the highest paid workers were the finalizers and tuners and intoners, those responsible to complete the work by bringing out a coherent instrument. They, in return, had feedback to the manufacturing stages happening before them and changes were fast to implement due to the flexibility of human workers.
Human adaptivity specifically comes into play for organic work materials like wood: a "feeling" for your work material and work piece allows to compensate for the natural variation of your raw material. That is particularly important when wood becomes an active part of the resonator (like with acoustic string instruments), less so when it is essentially inert (like with solid body electric guitars or, well, recorders).
All that ends with the old pieces mostly under control of a single instrument maker have had a lot more potential for active intervention, human experience, and evolution of techniques leading to a robust process for producing quality pieces. And the results will have a much larger variation of quality than modern methods, with the quality then competing in the market of demand and supply on a piece by piece basis.
For every great recorder of the past that is better than what you can buy nowadays, there are hundreds of quite worse recorders that got thrown away. And all of them cost a lot more to make in terms of human work hours than even expensive new instruments.
