Modern cars need an inspection every 30k km and hardly ever break down. When they do, they are usually toast so (at least financially). Older cars are financially toast as well, if you cannot do the work yourself so.
That's funny, because my OBDII reader tells me exactly which sensor logged a fault and what the fault is such as reading too high/low. Sure you can have oddball errors where a bus wire has its insulation melted and is sending noise over the CAN bus or something, but you also had bizarre issues on old engines with weird vacuum leaks in pipes and dashpots and all the other analogue junk that electronics have replaced.
People look at old cars through rose coloured glasses and forget having to clean distributors and adjust timing and fix tuning drift with carburettors.
"If it's got compression, and it's got fuel, and it's got a spark, then it's got to go".
He was right.
Yeah, but “skilled maintenance “ was an easy skill. There could only be a handful of things wrong if it didn’t start: e.g. no spark, no fuel. In the case of no spark, you check the plug, see if it’s dirty, change it if so; check the distributor, maybe the points are bad; check the coil or condenser… yeah there were things to check, but you could actually fix it once you learned about it. And yes, you could do this on the side of the road—there were “tool rolls” you could have for such purposes.
Now, you get a check engine light and the code reader says, in so many words: “bring to dealer and pay up”