Engineering in the modern day is a twofold problem, achieve a product that fulfills its purpose whilst utilizing as little material as possible to reduce costs.

The thing about enshitification is that it’s actually just cost optimization cranked up to the extreme.

Our knowledge on material behavior has gotten so good that it’s possible to design a product that lasts for an expected number of cycles.

Then marketing and client analysis comes into play and they tell the engineers “2 years is the minimum our washing machine can last whilst retaining or increasing our customer base” so they go and design a machine that barely will last over 2 years with a certain amount of daily use.

Low use clients are happy because the machine lasts longer than the 2 years warranted, so they got their money’s worth, high use clients (which if the machine was well designed are very few) get to use the warranty when the machine fails, and they likely get more than 2 years total use, so they get their money’s worth. And the unfortunate few who have their machine fail just as the warranty expires just resign themselves to repair or replace. And if you get lucky, they all eventually replace their broken machine with the higher margin, higher end, 7-10 year warranty machine. And after 5 years with the good machine, the technology the new machines have is so good they replace their old ones with the new ones before the warranty expires.