Regarding spilling on keyboards: I don't know anyone personally who does that, in my local area people don't eat or drink next to their devices. I do have plenty of people I don't personally know that did ruin their computers that way and I have replaced plenty of Apple keyboards and entire topcases to solve it. Works fine as a side-business.
Repairing is not the same as upgrading, and recycling is not the same as throwing away, and neither is reusing. The difference is important, as the solution changes with the case.
Overall, this would be more fitting in a general discussion on environmental impact and not as much one about software, the hardware it runs on, and human behaviour. If you want to solve a big problem you need to generify instead of brand it as far as I know.
To dive in a little deeper: to 'fix' this, people need to spend less time on how beautiful their stuff is, or how cool they look, and go a more utilitarian route. But since the American economy is built around the opposite and the western European one has the tendency to follow it in some aspects that's unlikely to happy any time soon. Changing people is hard, it's also the best way to solve or fix or change anything.
Sorry, I thought this was illustrative enough to make my point, but if we have to be pendantic then here you go the exact same thing but with Macbooks:
https://twitter.com/RDKLInc/status/1251533085734252549
> in my local area people don't eat or drink next to their devices
Interesting local area you have there, at my office and all the offices i was in the past everyone has a cup of coffee right next to their laptop.
Again, two MacBooks and not millions, as explained in the twitter thread. Again, not defective but locked by the previous owner. Not even remotely related to 'right to repair'.
As an owner, I want to be sure that when I lock a device, it's actually unusable to anyone else. So this is good (for me).
You want your data to be inaccessible. Not providing a way to factory-reset a perfectly functioning device (say, by replacing a modular storage) is just irresponsible.
Hmm yes I do: https://twitter.com/RDKLInc/status/1275100376350384132
Have you also never had anyone you know spilling liquid on their keyboard after the warranty expired? Or dropped it?
So in the end yes, I am pretty sure that there are literal millions of devices being thrown away because repairing them is too expensive.
Edit: I'll also add that in 6 years using a mac, Apple replaced my macbook entirely twice for some issue that you would hope could be fixed without throwing everything away. So, sure, the customer is happy because they got a brand new device. But personnally I would rather stick with my 1 year old device and reduce environmental impact.