Maybe our family have just been lucky with the brands we pick, but I definitely haven't found this... My Electrolux fridge has been 100% solid for over seven years now, which I bought because my parents had had one for eight or nine years at the time (which is still going). My Bosch Series 8 front-loader washing machine has also been a tank, same age, no signs of anything going wrong, same story - I bought it because a friend had had a similar model for years, theirs is still going to...

Seems like there are still reliable appliances to be found, it's just probably that there's more low-quality cheaply made appliances on the market than there used to be, so it used to be easier to get a good one without researching so much...