Try flipping it around. If I presented an product to you and were able to convince you that it was of significantly better quality (more durable, fewer bad surprises etc) than other products in the same category, would you be most surprised to learn that it was also more expensive or that it was less expensive than these other products?

While it might be true that a higher price doesn't necessarily entail higher quality, it seems to me that higher quality almost always entails a higher price.

There are certainly a lot of cheaply/poorly build appliances covered in some shiny stainless or whatever the fashionable appliance sheathing of the moment is. New luxury developments have been pretty notorious for doing that sort of thing with the household appliances.

I've noticed quality of ordinary things has been declining for a long time now. Some things are better due to new technologies. Lot of stuff has just regressed.

Don't know why you were downvoted; new technologies should make things both cheaper and more reliable, but it doesn't seem to be working, at least not for white goods.

It's probably the opposite in many cases - new technologies allow to build things that are significantly cheaper, but also less durable. For example, thanks to precise numerical simulations, you can be much more precise in designing the elements so that they are as thin/light and use as little materials as possible. Before the CAD era, you just did it "by feel" and, to be safe, made things much more sturdier (and more expensive).

I have an example of that. In the late 1980's early 90's read an fluff piece in Product Design News or some such about a team of engineers at GE that got an award for designing a washing machine tilt sensor. The article then gushed that the reason this was wonderful was the tilt sensor would allow GE to replace expensive metal washing machine drum bearings with inexpensive plastic ones.

Without a tilt sensor they needed to use metal bearing because an out of balance load would break plastic bearings. But now with the tilt sensor plastic ones could be used.

New technologies add complexity. That always decreases reliability. Replace a robust button or mechanical timer mechanism with a touchscreen and now you have dozens of new components that can cause a failure.

I think in many areas it is just a race to the bottom, lowering prices at the expense of quality.

There's an (imperfect) cure for that - reviews.

That helps, but a) review are gamed extensively, b) a review usually can tell you that something has worked for a few days to a week after buying it.

If you want to know whether a product has an high chance to work in 2-3 year time you are out of luck, especially with SKUs changing all the time.

Yep. I'm fairly certain that companies change their SKUs all the time because they know that whatever they make will get a bad reputation (or neutral at best).