My anecdata says your anecdata is wrong. Everyone buys a car new and keeps it going for 10+ years until the cost to maintain it gets too high. Then they sell it for scrap or donate it for scrap and get a new car. The one person who trades in their car while getting a new one is the outlier in any group of people.

Also, it's not just cost. Sometimes newer models are just worse. There is one car that I thought about getting a little while ago, but the model changed dramatically 5 years earlier (the older version was what I used on a vacation that got me interested), so I had to look at getting a 5 year old car or a different model.