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Mercantilism never left and is in fact in use today in many sectors, with distorting effects on the market. The various more upmarket civilizational stacks existed on top of it, not displacing it entirely.
I'm not a hardcore libertarian or staunch believer in the free market, but it's trivial to understand that countries will naturally protect their own market when they believe they are noncompetitive.
But... why are we uncompetitive? Usually when you see mercantilism, it's to protect a new industry in a developing country, which is how Japan and Korea developed their automotive industries. And maybe China did/does too, so we could do a little to even the score. But if it's just "we cannot allow the auto industry to fail, ever" then it's a recipe for absolute stagnation, like India's domestic auto industry did for the entire cold war.
It's weird that the US auto industry, the oldest, most-developed auto industry on earth, just can't compete with these young upstarts unless the government gives it bailouts.
The reason why is irrelevant. There could be any number of reasons, from cheaper labor to less regulations to quality differences to productivity reasons. But governments are made up of people, and people who are incentivized not to let things fail are obviously going to work in service of those claims.
The Chinese factory example is apt. If you are a western nation, can you compete with that workforce, notoriously selective regulation and an ability to simply make as much as the market can absorb? Well, sure, you could. What's stopping you, aside from, well - the people in your country? (Cf. American Factory)
The other side of the Bretton Woods financial coin making money fungible across national boundaries: if you don't have some sort of protectionism in place, your economy will see significant cash outflows to foreign countries. This is hugely beneficial to countries that are primarily export based, as the US was post-WW2... and not so much in the other direction.
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