Unlikely. I see this frequently, where niche vendors charge a lot for discontinued products.

Perhaps demand for discontinued products is not uncommon.

It can have other reasons than the old products being bad (e.g. I recently bought two copies of a discontinued mosue at higher-than-MSRP prices because switching to a different model costs me in time to get used to it) but I wouldn't discount it as a major factor. A lot of products really have gotten shittier replacements.

> A lot of products really have gotten shittier replacements.

A perpetual pattern in humanity is this refrain coming from old people. :-) You can find examples of it from centuries ago.

A lazy response in online discussions is this idea that "old man yells at clouds" is somehow an argument for how things have not gotten worse. We are in a thread discussing an instance where a company is making their product worse FFS.

It is reducing the value of something merely to one attribute.