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Semiconductors are the standard example. You can build a transistor in a cave with a box of scraps, but it's going to be pretty limited, and it's going to depend on material you can't just scrounge up in a random field somewhere. The actual production we do today involves collecting materials from 30+ sites around the globe, refining them with a few dozen different chemical processes each with their own feedstocks, and then brought through several layers of actual manufacturing of tools until eventually you get the final output.
Each individual step could theoretically scale down (though you'd have trouble trying to send One Dude or even Ten Dudes to run the extremely complex mine in the middle of nowhere, if only for 'and then they went stir crazy' problems. But there's still a ton of steps, they require drastically different areas of expertise, and in some cases they're just geographically separate. You don't just need a rare earths industry and quartz mining and a power plant and a metalworking field. You don't even just need the chemical feedstocks and mining tool production system and oil refining and tool development. You need all of them and hundreds more besides, and it's recursive.
Worse, the costs and initial creation are extreme, only made up because the unit price is low. If it takes 600 people to design, test, and implement a new generation of x86 processors, that's a low-end estimate of 120m investment in just personnel development costs -- great if you can amortorize it over 500m chips; terrible if there's only 1m users. Some stuff that might be possible might not be viable. Others get friction just because the level of demand changes: in our world, there's several people who have full-time jobs making nothing but M3x10 standard screws, phillips-head. Boring, but good work if you can get it. In a world of a 100 people, there's one guy who has to make every single necessary screw, and he's making up 1% of your workforce rather than 0.000000001% of your population even assuming he still has all the automation because he has to keep up with it and swap things out.
There are technical solutions or psuedo-solutions to some of these matters, but many of them have their own minimum threshold: if you want AI-powered robots, you need the semiconductor industry and TSMC and a whole industry of brushless motors and servos and yada; if you want to use genetic engineering to bypass some of the pharmaceutical industry's issues, you need a lot of infrastructure built toward that. ABS injection molding can be modeled as a tool for letting a small number of workers make a truly astronomical number of output parts, but requires its own (admittedly relatively small) industrial base... and it's also one that only make sense for unit sizes over 10k, because if you just need five of a thing, it takes more time to produce with ABS injection than it would to vacuum form, urethane cast, or cut with a CNC.
Some of these technical solutions are, in turn, their own problems in a 'minimum viable society' question. We take it a given the only 2-3% of society needs to work on farms in order to produce adequate food, but that's downstream of mechanization and automation, geographically distributed crop production, bulk-scale automated storage, so on. You don't need GPS to run tractors, but you probably do need GPS or RTK-likes ground-only solutions to run semi-automated tractors. You don't need exact rubbers or metal formulations, but you do need pretty exacting ones to make the modern super-sized tractors. You probably do need chemical fertilizers and widely-available forced-water hydration, which isn't a big ask but still takes somebody building it.
I'm not committed to the 500m number, or to any number. There's a real bad habit of people looking at the past to just assume that the western workforce of a time was necessary to produce that time, and that's clearly not true.
But I'm very skeptical that it's so not true that 'set up an isolated society on a convenient island' is possible without a continent, without massive compromises or drastic changes to quality of life.
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