I still don't believe you, because I have an experience of repairing MBP too. In my case it was damaged keyboard. They decided to replace entirely that half of the notebook. It was surprising approach and price was high, but still lower than price of the new MBP with the same CPU/RAM/SSD characteristics.

In fairness to the previous poster, replacing a keyboard should be cheaper than replacing an SSD (which is soldered into macs, requires a more expensive replacement part then needs an OS reinstall which a keyboard wouldn’t).

Apple intentionally builds their keyboards in such a way that it is incredible difficult to replace, the amount of skilled labor required doesn't make it profitable to just replace the keyboard. Its eye opening seeing a keyboard replacement being performed: https://youtu.be/4KuVvb9DTaU?t=309

Who is to blame for letting it get so far? I think its not just Apples fault, its governments fault not regulating them and consumers fault for still buying and even defending their practices (which you can very well observe in this thread).

They are replacing whole half of the notebook. It's everything except the monitor. So price is the same.