I am still undecided if quality has actually dropped, or if culture has just gotten more consumerist and we use "everything is poorly made" as a trope to justif

I am still undecided if quality has actually dropped, or if culture has just gotten more consumerist and we use "everything is poorly made" as a trope to justify more consumption. For example, when I bought my home 5 years it came with a Washer and Dyer in the basement, these were not high end units, and I fully expected to need to replace them. However getting large appliances out of my basement is a pain in the ass, so 2 years ago when the dryer broke I was faced with having to get it out of the basement. You know what I did instead, I watched a YT video, bought a rebuild kit on Amazon and spent a Sunday afternoon fixing it myself. Cost me about 5 hours of time, and $75 in parts. Been working fine since. In the "old days" the expense of the item required them to be repaired as a large appliance would be a big purchase. Today because of the efficiency and automation in modern manufacturing the cost of a large appliance may be higher in real terms, if you looked at it from something like "per hour of average labor to buy" it is very cheap, to the point that paying a repair person to spend 2 hours + $75 in parts to fix my dryer likely exceeds the cost of just buying a new one down at Lowes. In the end I dont know of quality has dropped or if things have just gotten cheaper to make.... Same with news... Information used to be very expensive to disseminate. Printing Press, Books, etc. as Technology has increased the cost to disseminate has dropped to the point where information flow is basically free today.