My wife and I were the same. We've had Nexus before, and then Pixels. No problems with any. Wife's currently on a 3, and I was on a Pixel 2.

I had originally planned to upgrade to the 5, but decided to switch to the OnePlus 8 as I was pretty underwhelmed by the 5's specs.

As another data point I've replaced the camera lens and the glass backplate on my 2. The lens went fine. The glass is something like 0.25mm off in basically all dimensions (height, width, thickness). I can feel the transition when I miss the fingerprint sensor. So 3rd party replacements are "okay." This isn't a huge issue, just annoying since I recently replaced it.

Other than that, which I'd call self inflicted since I've had the phone for years and dropped it a few times and hike a lot, I've had no issues. Maybe the 2 had better QC?

The nexus devices were designed and manufactured by another company. Both my Nexus 5 and Nexus 5X experienced boot loops due to hardware.

I have a nexus 5 that bootlooped, and fixed it.

Disassembled the phone, and took off the power button from the main board. Turned out the soldering job inside the power button was badly done, and the looping was due to a piece of solder that had come loose and was shorting the connection.

So now I have a totally functional nexus 5, but to use the power button I have to stick a piece of tin foil down inside where the power button used to be. I have a mod on there that added a 4th home row button which covers all but the 'on' functions of that button.

I got my N5X working long enough to copy off the pictures by disassembling it and using a heat gun. Some people have used their kitchen ovens and supposedly permanently fixed it.

Yeah, that's why I figure it's the bit of loose solder that's the ultimate cause. My solution was to remove the whole mechanism and the solder with it.

FYI, I had an Android phone where the power button stopped working. I was able to turn it on by plugging it in and quickly unplugging it.

May be easier than finding tin foil (or aluminum foil).

Thanks, I'll try that.

Nexus 6P, no bootloops, but the phone would start shutting down once the battery reached about 32% reliably (i.e., with 100% certainty, not just sometimes).

Barely 1.5 years after being purchased new. Combined with the fact that the battery on it was already shoddy and only degraded significantly with time, I legitimately would have to keep my charger always on me, or I might get stuck with a dead phone.

2 of my friends who bought Nexus 6P around the same time also had issues, with one hitting the infamous bootloop issue, and another one experiencing battery issues and automatic shutdown similar to mine.

Same here for both phones after 1 year...