When I was in high school (78-81), the price of a new Stratocaster was around $400, and the price of a new Les Paul Custom was around $600. At that point, both of those guitars were mostly hand-made, and they had widely varying quality, even within production runs of "identical" instruments. You needed to play a dozen of them to find a really good one. Since that time, we have seen the trend of instrument bodies / necks being milled by CNC machines and equipped with pickups created on computer-controlled winders. The quality of modern mass-produced electric guitars is consistently quite good, with much less variation between individual instruments. Mass production on high-speed automated equipment has eliminated a number of previously human-driven processes, so there is significant time and labor savings, with greatly reduced error rates. Admitedly, pricing of the instruments is not solely driven by the efficiency gains via automation. High-quality guitar woods have increased in price, rosewood and ebony fretboard blanks are expensive, and so on. But let's look at the current state...
I happen to own both Fender and Gibson guitars, plus other brands. This isn't an indictment of either company, just my observation and some basic math. If you flip through the Musician's Friend or Sweetwater catalog, you'll see that in current dollars, a top-of-the-production-line Fender (non-signature model) Stratocaster instrument can be purchased for around $1200. Similarly, a new Gibson (non-signature) Les Paul Custom is in the neighborhood of $3500.
For the same $3500 that would get you a stock LP Custom, you could buy two stunningly appointed handmade guitars from Carvin, built to your custom specification. Or you could buy a lovely Paul Reed Smith. Or you could buy three pretty groovy Strats. Or you could have Warmoth build you a couple of delicious fully custom guitars. And so on.
The $1200 price of a high-end production Strat is pretty close to the cost of building a strat clone of equivalent quality appointments / electronics / woods. As I note above, you could build a nice neck-through Les Paul style guitar for about $1200 too. I admit there is certainly some cachet in the brand itself. But, with the LP Custom carrying a $3500 price tag, does the Gibson logo justify $2300 worth of that price?
... so no worries here and a Les Paul Custom in Silverburst that I love and will not go to my grave with me but will be sold by my wife long after I've gone.