They say that nobody was
They say that nobody was willing to build a manual transmission for the new Stingray Corvette, and I believe that. One thing about the previous manual transmissions is that they can have their development cost spread across many different cars. Plus there is a large aftermarket business for front engine rear wheel drive cars from buyers who want to swap out an old automatic for a slick new manual, to people who want to do a restomod on a classic car. But for a mid engine design there are far fewer new car that would share the transmission, and there is virtually no market for older car retrofits. Maybe a few kit cars, but certainly not enough to justify the development costs. For me it is a lot more involving to manually control the gears, and two of my cars have manual transmissions, but I have to admit that I would probably choose the automatic in the Corvette Stingray simply because it has distinct performance advantages.