Should be asleep at 3am, but instead I've gone down the microchip rabbit hole. How people can even manufacture with any consistency something that is only like a dozen atoms wide, at scale, and with any predictability is so far beyond me. What clever machine(s) could even do this?

Think of the largest things we have ever built. The tallest skyscrapers, the biggest cargo ships, the longest roads. Compared to chips, they seem easy. You can slice up any big thing into manageable pieces, then put them together like legos. But a billion+ transistors on a chip that's a few cm wide?