You are correct and I have considered this because in general I, too, dislike the trend of profits being focused on ever fewer owners.

However, what is the better option here?

A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs.

B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs.

My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.

That's a good point, but I would argue that lack of digitalisation is a real bottleneck for industries.

Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand.

Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.

There are only so many PCBs and cupcakes that the world needs. Consolidation displaces competitors and their employees/jobs.

My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.

This is not about consolidation.

The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes.

I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it.

Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with.

Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.