The ideal is more like a culture of businesses making repairabke products and consumers refusing to buy unrepairable slop
A startup isn't prevented from making whatever "unrepairable" alternative it wants. In fact, if it has no repair operation of its own, it's not required by the law to do anything at all. Most startups fall in that category.
Past few decades have demonstrated that this ideal doesn't work. That's why we have laws. I've never understood why the HN crowd is so averse to forcing companies to account for the common good. It's proven to work.
HN is a quite economically libertarian place and it is full of "ashamed billionaires" and founders who yearn for creating companies that will fuck their customers over. There are many engineers who also think the same and think themselves as business-aware.
Rule of law and strong consumer protection is fundamentally against to contemporary startup mindset that prioritizes monopolization over everything else and rent seeking behavior.
"Manufacturers tend to be less supportive of right-to-repair efforts, as corporations stand to make more money charging for tools, replacement parts, and repair services than if they were to just let people fix things on their own."
This is not the reason manufacturers oppose right-to-repair. They oppose right to repair because a device that is repaired is one less sale of a new device, and they do not want anything interfering with that "new device sales treadmill".
