And as the article notes, the monks quickly learned that doing all this manually would have been cost prohibitive.

I think we romanticize in our day and age the “method”. That is, we think that gothic architecture can only be built using the methods of the middle ages, that otherwise it is “fake”. It’s a strange prejudice that would have been foreign to the builders and architects of the original gothic cathedrals. These were people who were at the cutting edge of architectural technology and skill, certainly the cutting edge in Europe, not people who romanticized “being artisanal”. Frankly, the sophistication of gothic architecture rivals much of what we build today in many respects.

We also suffer from the strange, progressive, prejudiced belief that older styles are “anachronistic” if used today. They’re just styles. What does time have to do with anything? Architectural developments since the middle ages might change how we build such architecture or remove what had previously been a constraint imposed by the methods of the day (note the neogothic), but the essential character can remain the same…or it can undergo development.

I think that the availability of CNC machines makes architecturally beauty all the more accessible. Why we aren’t taking more advantage of the possibilities, I don’t know.

b and c aren’t really applicable if you use modern methods for producing the decoration and still use concrete for the underlying structure. Modern builders just hate decoration due to bias. I’m not even sure cost is necessarily a reason because lots of bizarre and unnecessary structure is added to some buildings just to make them unique.