Even with Alibaba and Aliexpress, there is some marginal value-add from a middle man. Like I said, in the EU, sellers are liable for 2 years of warranty for manufacturing defects.
But any dropshipper worth their salt has other sources for their shit too. Not necessarily direct from manufacturer, but companies that provide better prices than publicly available for B2C. I hear some of them are more or less invite-only. In any case, the Alis aren't considered great dropshipping vendors at all, since goods can take very long to reach customers.
And then as a dropshipping business expands, you can have local stock for some items. Generally, a dropshipping business should fill a specific niche and not have a billion items on sale, but rather be curated. So if you've got like 4 or 5 alternatives in some specific product category and one or two clearly sell better than the rest, on a consistent basis, you can order those in bulk and ship to your customers faster. The downside here is that you have more work to do, but you'll provide more value to your customers. And if your dropshipping business is honest, you can lead times visible on the website... And customers will love seeing "tomorrow" instead of "14-21 days".
It's because for every dev who asks too soon there's another dev somewhere that doesn't ask at all, bills 300 hours their first month without being asked to, delivers nothing because they refused to ask for help and couldn't figure it out either. That dev is why people hate off-shoring to India. They did not work a second month.