They did great work with the materials they had available, but the materials they had were quite poor. Tamahagane is a very poor steel which requires a great deal of forging to work the slag inclusions out. The extensive folding was done to purify the steel; with a higher quality steel doing that isn't necessary. Contemporary Middle East and European metallurgists had better material to work with and their best steel, crucible spring steel, was better than the best Japanese steel.

I think it's sort of funny that people are idolizing medieval Japanese swordsmiths.

"They folded their blades 200 times!!!"

Yes, because they had to, because the source material was pretty crap comparatively. Not because they were some kind of magical elven runesmiths making densetsu katanas.

The lost art of sword forging.

I still find it hilarious that 'Damascus steel' was a snow-job by the merchants to keep people from cutting out the middle man, by naming it after a place half a continent away from where it was being sourced.

You may be buying it from Damascus but that crucible steel was coming from Hyderabad.

What a lot of people also don't know is that forging doesn't give the steel it's strength. Forging is done because it is way easier/cheaper than melting and casting it.

Quenching and tempering gives it it's desired strength.

Forged, cast and machined parts of equal dimensions have entirely different grain structures.

They have different grain flow. The strength is almost entirely depending on the metallurgy.

My understanding was that forging is work hardening (but hard and strong are not the same thing), annealing cancels it out, which is why quenching and tempering are important.

Also the story of the structure of the metal is a bit different when you've folded it 100's of times. No blacksmith or foundry is getting that sort of fine work in their material.

Forging squeezes the slag out, thereby purifying the steel. As far as I am aware this was the primary mechanism by which folding steel (which was done about a dozen times, not hundreds; those larger numbers come from 2^[n folds]) strengthened Japanese blades.

Was. These days the labor involved in hand-forging a part dominates and cast alloys are everything anyone uses for anything, outside of oddball boutique communities like fancy knife aficionados.