Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone.
My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver.
Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.
Meanwhile I've repaired my old washing machine quite easily.