There is enormous survivorship bias with this 'stuff was way better back in the day' argument - there have always been awful products produced, but those get re

There is enormous survivorship bias with this 'stuff was way better back in the day' argument - there have always been awful products produced, but those get replaced quickly. An awful fridge from the 1950s was replaced by the 1960s. Engineers weren't deliberately overengineering things back then out of some sense of pride, they were just worse at engineering (and material science) - some things were over-engineered, because we didn't know better ways to solve that problem, and some things were under-engineered for the same reason. I think the increased cost of labor relative to manufactured goods is a big driver of this perceived change, as nobody wants to pay a repair guy $500 to come out and fix their $500 fridge. If the fridge cost $20k we would probably still fix them and they would have a long lifetime (and the repair guy would still charge $500, like an HVAC guy), but there is almost no market for a $20k fridge when a $500 fridge is available.