Meanwhile, Cherry kept making the same product line which they had since the 1980s, with relatively minor improvements.

OK, but did it really? I've seen this claim pop up occasionally, but nobody ever points to the patent in question. A quick Google search for "cherry mx patent 2014" shows the oldest result as being a Reddit comment from 2017 (https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/6am47a/comment/dh...):

> The patent expired in 2014. Many people have been paying the same price for mechanical keyboards with cheaper Chinese MX switches without knowing.

And an Ars Technica article from 2023 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/hands-on-with-cherry...):

> For 20 years, Cherry’s patent on mechanical switches made it the only player around. That patent’s expiration around 2014, though, released the floodgates and allowed countless copycats and switches with varying levels of modification to the cross-stem design to pour in.

However, what seems to be the actual Cherry MX switch patent (US4467160A) was filed in 1983 and expired all the way back in 2003. So what exactly expired in 2014?

I was looking for a portable external keeb recently, and I looked to Cherry and they simply had nothing which even approximately matched the form factor I needed. I wanted to buy from them, but couldn't.

Manufacturing in Germany is dying, making anything which is cost competitive is impossible and the measures trying to fix it are miniscule compared to the magnitude of the problem.