The history of precision machinery is a steady ladder of using old machines to produce new more accurate components, and then new more accurate machines.
But simply making something smaller is not synonymous with it automatically becoming more accurate or capable of achieving higher resolution. If anything, very high precision machines are typically larger in size than the less accurate ones.
In a series of lectures in 1938, tv inventor Philo Farnsworth explained the need to develop "the tools to make the tools to make the tools" to make high tech stuff. He originated the phrase.