Growing up my dad was a machinist. This was in the 80s and CNC was what he evolved into from manual die cutting. He did a lot of government work where they most often times didn't know what the part was for or it was only a subset of the components. Most often times he'd be working on a 10+ ton die for a huge part, think landing gear, where the tolerances were in the thousandths. I always thought that was amazing the precision he could achieve by hand. That became even more remarkable to me as I got older and realized machines were now doing the math. About 4 years ago I built a homelab CNC. I wanted something more robust than a lot of the belt driven options out there and settled on a company called CNCRouterParts (now called AvidCNC) [0]. The downside is it consumes a fair bit of space. But between the laser cutter (Glowforge), 3D printer (Prusa) and CNC (CNCRouterParts) you can do quite a bit of light fabrication at home these days.
Making large, precise workpieces is an artform, you have to take temperature of the workpiece into account, compensate for that, expansion of the bed and so on. Very tricky to do that repeatedly with any degree of accuracy.
[0] https://www.avidcnc.com/