I mostly agree.
>cars need much less maintenance these days.
And, especially if you lived somewhere with snow and salt on the roads, they mostly lasted about 50K miles before they rusted out. Growing up, it was an unusual car that made it to 100K.
That said, minor repairs of otherwise functional gear can make sense. I'm generally in agreement on electronics. But I fairly commonly repair or have repaired hiking or camping gear for example that just needs some stitching to get back in working condition.
There still seems to be a market for repairing high end stuff. Shoe repair and clothing alteration stores haven't really gone anywhere
I suspect it's declined pretty significantly--in fact, because people wear fewer shoes that can be repaired and wear less tailored clothing. But of course there are still tailors and cobblers (who are often a good place to get backpacks and the like repaired) are still around. Many laundry places will do minor repairs as well.
In the anecdata department, the last time I took something into REI to be repaired they told me they didn't do that any longer and to send it to Rainy Pass in Seattle.
Ignoring the big 'if': most goods today are better than what we had in 1950. Especially if you compare the quality of goods that required the median worker to work the same amount of hours.
The 'junk' you talk about takes minutes of work to earn enough to buy. And most of the time, that's good enough. The stuff that you spend a few hours of pay on, is mostly so much better.
Another commenter already pointed out that the example of repairability don't really hold up. It's mostly because wages have increased that repairing those things doesn't make much sense any more.
Just think how much time even well-to-do middle class women used to spent on darning socks and mending clothing. Basic clothing is too cheap to measure these days.
Cars need much less maintenance these days.
It's easy to view the past with rose tinted lenses. But most things were really crappy.
See https://www.gwern.net/Improvements for more on this perspective:
> clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”; the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien3, clothing companies routinely burn millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than the cost of selling them, and Africa is flooded by discards.
> materials science has produced constant visible-yet-invisible improvements in textiles yielding, among other things, far better insulated (and cheaper) winter jackets: instead of choosing between winter coats which make you look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or freezing (and if you get wet, freezing anyway) or exotic ultra-expensive garments aimed at mountain climbers, you can now buy ordinary (and much cheaper) winter coats which are amazingly thin and work even better to keep you warm—so much so that you have to be careful to not buy too well-insulated a coat, lest you swelter at the slightest exertion and be placed between the Scylla of overheating & the Charybdis of opening your coat to the freezing air to cool.
I submitted Gwern's piece at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865