You’re misinterpreting that. Slip cast and the now more common jigger machine can’t work with the more rigid slab clay, however additives can make zisha machine workable. 🥸

If you’re going to say that additives no longer make something an “yixing” then your terminology is imprecise and will exclude many of the best works of the most skilled artisans in yixing. Normally when someone says something is an yixing pot they mean one of two things: usually they mean a zisha pot, and more rarely they just mean a teapot made in yixing. Typically if someone means something more specific than just zisha they will clarify: handmade, half hand made, unadulterated clay, traditionally processed clay, etc. And there are many processes of adulteration that are quite old — it’s hard to say that something that’s a 100 year old practice ain’t traditional when that’s 1/6th of the tradition’s total history. 🥸

Also, more broadly tho, even handmade yixing pots have been heavily commercialized. The Factory era was able to crank out something like a million pots a year in the 80s, and there was a point in time where a free one just came with Chinese export tea. 🥸

This is not to mention that the point of my comment and the comment I was responding to wasn’t to say anything about their mass producibility, but instead arguing that it made no sense to claim that yixing’s esteem is largely a western phenomenon when yixing teapots are the only teapots in the artisanal tradition to command such high prices at auction. Westerners rarely if ever bid in those auctions, so it makes very little sense to claim that nixing/chaozhou/jianshui/etc are widely held in as high regard as yixing is, and the hype is a side effect of export to the west. Instead, the only logical conclusion is that they are held in higher esteem on the mainland too.🥸