I am probably late to the party, but which fairy tales we tell kids that being tech savy is a bad thing?

In the case of contempt for technical people, this commenter is right. It’s one of the major things that keeps girls (and many boys too, but we ignore them) out of tech. When you’re young and fitting in and being cool is hugely important to you, you don’t want to be seen as a geek or a nerd, so you avoid certain topics. This is built into our culture at a deep level, it’s even in the fairy tales we tell kids. But we can’t even discuss it because the ‘it’s the patriarchy’ crowd don’t want to hear any conflicting ideas.

But I’m less convinced that our lack of manufacturing can be attributed to this. We used to have such an industry, but it came apart in the 70s/80s, and I don’t buy that we suddenly became contemptuous of it then (some have always been contemptous of it, but plenty of people at the time were hoping to land jobs in traditional manufacturing, and a lot of people were proud of working in that industry). Furthermore, contempt of technical people is embodied in the idea of the ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’: there’s a particular stereotype. This is not true of manufacturing-type people.

We do have a significant computer-games industry, thanks to the ZX spectrum boom of the 80s. Still, there has long been a prejudice against technical subjects/people. I think the expectations of many in the 70s/80s were that they/their children would go into traditional manufacturing roles , but those jobs were gone by the time those children grew up. People weren’t prejudiced against that, they expected “you’ll go down pit like father and grandfather before you” But the pits were closed.