Same situation, hardly anyone believes me that I'm skilled in construction, electrical, plumbing, electronics, and car mechanics in addition to my IT skills, be

Same situation, hardly anyone believes me that I'm skilled in construction, electrical, plumbing, electronics, and car mechanics in addition to my IT skills, because hardly anyone actually tinkers with things or repair them. Meanwhile, I always followed my dad's advice (who was doing construction when I grew up) that you should invest your time and money in tools and knowledge, not in disposable things. I can disassemble, repair, and reassemble nearly anything, and thanks to that have built my own high quality things, repaired many older high quality things, and generally structured my life around "buy it for life" with repairability as part of it. Unfortunately, the one exception to above is laptop & phone, where I buy Apple products because they are just clearly the superior option, but unfortunately are not very repairable at all. Nonetheless, I kept my iPhone 8 going until just recently where I finally bumped to an iPhone 14 Pro, and I have kept my 2013 MacBook Pro going and am still using it, although it may be replaced soon. I really wish things were built to be repairable, but like you I have long suspected (and cursed) the engineers who design products have never actually tinkered with them so don't even consider this as part of the design. They are only optimized for assembly because there is a business cost reason to do so, but repairability doesn't matter to them.