The last two refrigerators I bought had dependable ice makers.

I just overheard an installer talking to a neighbor while installing his refrigerator.

The tech said most modern refrigerations only last 10 years at best though.

See: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-r... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801

I checked some list prices, and they're a substantial price of the fridge itself. Some site said $200-$450 to replace one, another said the part itself is $100-$500 without even including labor. At those prices, I can see why people might just buy new. It's also something most people would want to hire a professional for; refrigerants are not good to inhale, and this needs to be air-tight.

I would also hope that most of them get refurbished. It's pretty hard to just "discard" a fridge. You have to call someone at the city (or GoodWill), and I presume they sell those to refurbisher. They're worth some money.

So I think in reality, it goes to a refurbisher who fixes it, then sells it to someone else who replaces and even older fridge. So the fridge that actually ends up in a landfill might be a 1960s deep freeze. The same idea as used cars.

It took me four broken machines to find a model without that exact same design flaw...

It seems a lot of the problems with these kind of products is that most customers use them quite little, and so they don't see a major fallout even for problems that'd be trivial to fix (many of the ice maker models in question has a switch to stop rotation too far in the opposite direction) and so it just gets ignored.

My ice maker has been working fine for over 15 years. My mother's ice maker has been working fine for about 25 years.

I spent a weekend pulling it out, thawing everything out, and then replacing the defroster coil, thinking that would fix it. It didn't -- it worked for about a week afterwards until freezing over again.