A skill is a person, not an object
It is easy to look at a woven panel or a carved lintel as a survival from a vanished kingdom. It is more accurate to say that someone was taught it, and taught someone else, in an unbroken line that happens to be older than the building it decorates.
That line is the fragile part. A technique does not disappear when a museum closes; it disappears when the last person who was taught it has nobody to teach.
Silk, brocade and the loom's arithmetic
Lao and Isan supplementary-weft weaving encodes its patterns in the setup of the loom rather than in a drawing. The weaver is holding a structure in memory and executing it as thread, which is why a pattern can be regional to a single village and why it is lost in one generation if it is not passed on.
The commercial pressure runs the other way. A simplified pattern weaves faster and sells at the same price to a visitor who cannot tell, and that arithmetic is what quietly erodes the difficult work.
Where the money has to come from
Crafts survive where there is a living in them. That means buyers who can see the difference between the hard version and the easy one, and who will pay the difference, which is mostly a matter of being told what to look for.
It is the least romantic conclusion and the most useful one: the way to keep a craft alive is to make the skilled version worth more to the person making it than the shortcut is.
