I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but instead, labor is expensive now because labor is scarce, which is true. And that regulation is expensive, which it is, but also necessary.
Perhaps the question is why wages are not high enough to support these prices (globalization, productivity wage gap over the last fifty years, etc). This will change over time due to structural demographics [1] making labor much more scarce (pushing up wages), we’re still in the early days. Software is not going to eat the trades and HVAC repair.