I find this an interesting statistics, in 2023 there were 36.5k total people employed in the US coal industry. [1] It's simply just not a lot of people in the grand scheme. That speaks to how industrialized coal production is in the US - it doesn't take that many people to do mountain top removal and drive heavy machinery.

FWIW & for comparison, Circuit city at its peak employed 40k people, that's more people than the US Coal industry employs today [2]

[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/coa...

[2] https://medium.com/@ramireznatalie/the-collapse-of-circuit-c...