Trust me I'm an engineer? But always happy to have HN debug my fridge, so here we go: turns out the light bulb, when replaced, keeps overheating and even metled the surrounding casing. Some electrical issue I'd have to take the fridge apart to debug. I might be unfair with this one though, it's a 20 year old fridge and is probably serviceable.

Keeps melting .. in a fridge ... it should never be on more than 30s at a time surely?

I guess you’ve tried a lower wattage bulb ...

Not modern fridges.

That trend has become ubiquitous: cars, laptops, phones...

Nothing is designed to be fixed at home anymore. If there were regulations that required it, we'd still have the same advanced tech, but it'd be repair friendly.

For example HP Elitebooks ond Dell business class laptops have most parts replaceable and the keyboard is secured by screws.

HP Pavilion gaming, ASUS ROG Strix and newer Macbooks have keyboards secured by melting topcase plastic pins or bolts so you can't easily replace keyboard, you need to replace the whole topcase.

And the keyboard is something which degrades by use and can easily be damaged by liquid...