Absolutely this. I am sure there are recorded cases where companies have gone out of their way to make things break early but I think it’s more times than not simply that cost matters and consumers are the voters and for the majority cheap wins. The average consumer is not very thoughtful and will opt to buy the cheaper good. For sure there are many economic constraints and not everyone has the luxury of buying quality but that’s not always the issues.

This comes up a lot with washing machines and I sympathize with parts of it, why not standardize control boards more or other components in the machine but one of the biggest issues is simply the cost of labor in places like the US is high enough that it’s hard to make it cost effective to repair.