You're right that "there are parts of our society where junk isn't well tolerated", but the scope of those areas is far greater than you give credit for.
All around me, people's houses, the roads, the infrastructure, food cultivation and preparation, furniture, vehicles, it goes on and on, the tendency is towards loose approximation, loose standards. Things are constantly breaking, the quality is low, people are constantly being poisoned by the waste seeping into their water, air and soil, by the plastic they burn to cook their food, by the questionable chemicals in the completely unsafe industrial environments they work in to produce toxic products consumed by the masses.
There is no uniform size of steps. Yet the majority of humanity lives this way, and not just tolerates it but considers it a higher standard of living than we've had for the majority of human history.
I don't think people in the first world are a different species, so we will also adapt to whatever shitty environment we regress into as our standards fall. We'll realize that the majority of the areas we may consider sacrosanct are in fact quite negotiable in terms of quality when it comes down to our needs.
All this is to say that yeah, I think people will generally tolerate the quality of software going down just fine.
> A consumer
is all that ultimately matters.
All those things you’re talking about may or may not matter some day, after years and a class action lawsuit that may or may not materialize or have any material impact on the bottom line of the company producing the toaster, by which time millions of units of subpar toasters that don’t work sideways will have sold.
The world is filled with junk. The majority of what fills the world is junk. There are parts of our society where junk isn’t well tolerated (jet engines, mri machines) but the majority of the world tolerates quite a lot of sloppiness in design and execution and the companies producing those products are happily profitable.