I've never found it easy to believe that it's cheaper to have workers in the Eastern Hemisphere mold your noxious plastic gewgaws, load them into a shipping container, truck them to the depot, load them onto a train, chugga-chugga-chugga them to the port, crane them on a floating steel island, diesel them across ninety degrees of latitude, past pirates, through toll gates owned by rent-seeking oligarchs, past another container ship jammed in the canal sideways, and then do it all in reverse on the other end, than it is to pay some American putz $7.50 an hour. But I guess it must be?
I think you're close to an insight here.
These Sharpies have six components. A plastic cap, a plastic barrel, a plastic plug at the bottom, ink, the metal tip-holder, and the functional part that actually does something - and is imported from Japan.
It's not a stretch of the imagination to envision a factory that makes three plastic chunks, some ink, and one metal part. Your supply-chain is basically: injection plastic, dyes, and some tin. For Sharpie, it's trivial.
Now imagine making a cell phone. Screen comes from one supplier. Glass from another. PCB comes from another. Battery from another. Chipset from another. Camera from another. Sensors from another. Plastic/metal case from another. And each of those inputs is complex enough that wherever they come from, two or more layers of other suppliers are involved. It's a whole ecosystem of manufacture. Well... China et al managed to turn themselves into a supermarket grocery store. Doesn't matter if you need eggs, flour, diapers, or get-well-soon cards, you can get it all in one place. That is why it becomes worth shipping. Enough individual specialties moved, making it synergistic for more to move.