I've been lucky enough to live in basically the same place since the '90s with almost all the same neighbours, and when I'm invited into the houses of my older neighbours almost all of them have the same appliances they've had since the early 2000s. Meanwhile if I go into the houses of more recently moved in neighbours or younger neighbours who had to restock their houses when they moved in, often times when I enter into their houses to talk I notice that there's a new appliance every few months, almost all replaced due to poor performance or failure.
I myself have repaired everything from toasters to microwaves in the last few years as things have aged in my house, and it got me a reputation that has encouraged family members to bring things to me to be fixed. There's a stark difference in how things are made post 2010, and the quality only gets worse post 2020. Often times the cost cutting goes so beyond making manufacturability easier that it makes it impossible to use whatever it is for it's intended purpose for more than a few times.
For example older smoke detectors have the boards on legs where the screws go through them, and for high quality ones the legs have threaded brass inserts so that if you tighten things down after replacing the battery you don't have a chance of stripping the threading. Newer ones the boards just float freely inside the case and are held in by snap clips which become brittle after just a couple of years and break easily, meaning you have to glue the board back in after replacing the battery. Key fobs and remotes often suffer the exact same problem of using plastic snap clips which will break the first time you have to pry the body open to replace the CR2032 battery inside. I've had to buy a new car key specifically because of that. Showerheads use soft compound plastics for the flow rings which break down unlike their older rubber variants, not only clogging some of the showerhead's openings but also failing to function as a flow ring and allowing the full force of the pipe's throughput. Freestanding lamps no longer route the cable through the bottom and attach it via a ring inside the body as a double insulator. Instead often times the cable is just glued into a hole in the side, and if you're lucky there's a rubber ring to cap the hole and act as an insulator. I've gotten shocked from cheap metal desk lamps because of this. Clocks these days are just single chips blobbed onto a cheap board with an induction motor powered by a single AAA battery and three plastic gears to move the hands. Most have as severe a drift as minutes per week which gets worse as the batteries lose charge. Old ones used batteries to periodically wind springs under tension or the 60Hz frequency of the electric grid which would move a gear system at a consistent ratio, keeping drift under a few seconds a month.
Survivorship bias may be real, but even cheap garbage from the '90s is far better built than anything I can buy now that isn't hand made.
I myself have repaired everything from toasters to microwaves in the last few years as things have aged in my house, and it got me a reputation that has encouraged family members to bring things to me to be fixed. There's a stark difference in how things are made post 2010, and the quality only gets worse post 2020. Often times the cost cutting goes so beyond making manufacturability easier that it makes it impossible to use whatever it is for it's intended purpose for more than a few times.
For example older smoke detectors have the boards on legs where the screws go through them, and for high quality ones the legs have threaded brass inserts so that if you tighten things down after replacing the battery you don't have a chance of stripping the threading. Newer ones the boards just float freely inside the case and are held in by snap clips which become brittle after just a couple of years and break easily, meaning you have to glue the board back in after replacing the battery. Key fobs and remotes often suffer the exact same problem of using plastic snap clips which will break the first time you have to pry the body open to replace the CR2032 battery inside. I've had to buy a new car key specifically because of that. Showerheads use soft compound plastics for the flow rings which break down unlike their older rubber variants, not only clogging some of the showerhead's openings but also failing to function as a flow ring and allowing the full force of the pipe's throughput. Freestanding lamps no longer route the cable through the bottom and attach it via a ring inside the body as a double insulator. Instead often times the cable is just glued into a hole in the side, and if you're lucky there's a rubber ring to cap the hole and act as an insulator. I've gotten shocked from cheap metal desk lamps because of this. Clocks these days are just single chips blobbed onto a cheap board with an induction motor powered by a single AAA battery and three plastic gears to move the hands. Most have as severe a drift as minutes per week which gets worse as the batteries lose charge. Old ones used batteries to periodically wind springs under tension or the 60Hz frequency of the electric grid which would move a gear system at a consistent ratio, keeping drift under a few seconds a month.
Survivorship bias may be real, but even cheap garbage from the '90s is far better built than anything I can buy now that isn't hand made.