I've heard a lot about how building the Statue of Liberty, an offspring idea of the OG Colossus, was quite expensive and hard to build. Plus it was apparently super tall, how could a people with worse metallurgy, probably not as many funds as 19th century NYC/France build a very similar statue and have it survive until an earthquake did it in?
Wouldn't rust screw it over way before it could've fallen?
Strabo states with a degree of certainty that the ruins of the Colossus were visible when he wrote the Geography (English version here) at around the turn of the 1st century AD, and Pliny the Elder's Natural History goes into considerable detail about the construction of those ruins. We also have a fragmentary epigram dated prior to that appears to be a dedication of the Colossus, or at least of a giant statue of some kind at Rhodes.
As to its construction, I offer nothing beyond noting that there has been academic discussion that have reverse-engineered its construction (see here if you have access). I do not know if Pliny (or Philo, who also attests to seeing its ruins) is accurate in regards to the estimate of its height - much of the time I mentally replace specific measurements in Classical texts with vague ones - but it could be plausible nonetheless.