The first cards I designed did not involve computers at all. I laid them out on graph paper and, cut them with a scalpel or craft knife. In some cases, there were also isometric pencil drawings. The first holiday production run I did (42 cards) was brutal on my hands.
Being able to lay them out in a vector editor was a lot easier and, made changes less difficult.
Then came the plotting cutters. The first one I played with was a commercial sign cutter but, companies quickly moved towards making machines for home crafters. The second one of those I got (a Bosskut Gazelle) was good enough to cut some designs. Those still put pressure on the paper as they cut and, friction can do a lot of damage. Smaller detail can be difficult. It helped with prototyping and, I could knock out some designs pretty quickly. Those machines are still great for some things, like plasticized stock, which looks awful when laser-cut.
At that point, some of my friends had commercial laser machines for cutting cards and, wow, did I want one of those. Cutting paper without putting any physical pressure on it is the bomb. The Glowforge showed up and, was a lot more affordable than the other laser cutters I had used. Having one right here makes prototyping and production SO much easier.
For one of my earlier videos, I cut the same card with both the Gazelle and the Glowforge:
I did a design for a festival a few years ago that appeared in a zine distributed to attendees. I made a video showing how to cut that one by hand:
Together, those kind of show how it progressed as the technology matured and got less expensive.