I could not possibly agree less. You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?

> It's more likely to be it costs way more to make as nice a device that people want, that's also repairable.

Based on what evidence? Current practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take. These things aren't free to implement– there's a calculable ROI that they feel is worth spending millions of engineering and lobbying dollars to implement.

> How many people would pay that premium when they're never going to service it anyway?

Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell. If corporations screwed up the market bad enough to undervalue their products because they're mislabeled disposables, well then that's on them. If they can't make it work, I guarantee someone else will. Will there be downsides? There's downsides to everything. So far "stuff theoretically might be more expensive up-front even though this limits their ability to artificially extract money from customers later on without disclosing it" isn't quite a showstopper.