This is why I'm glad for EU laws; nowadays their objectives is to reduce e-waste. Electronic products now have a mandatory warranty of three years; I believe smartphones and such electronic devices need to have a lifetime of six.

But one-year warranties have been a thing everywhere for a long time I believe, so I hope you got your money back for both devices.

A good channel on youtube for these kinds of things is AvE, especially his older videos are good breakdowns and explanations of mostly electric tools where the creator points out things like molding, plastics, but also gears and probable failure modes - often a switch or as you mentioned, plastic gears or bad / missing bearings. The best device he had a teardown of was actually the Juicero, a massively over-engineered piece of hardware that was basically an inefficient press - as in, you get more juice just by hand-squeezing/rolling the overpriced Juicero bags.

Is that company still in business? If it does I'm sure some SF companies with too much money on their hands are still paying their subscriptions / deliveries.

Edit: it is not, they went out of business in 2017.