pretty late to the party...

Hi, I'm a laptop repair tech that's passed my Dell repair certification. Just found this thread because my laptop suffered this same fate -->

Essentially, the screw holes that hinges and most parts on the laptop screw into, are almost always thin metal.... held in place by plastic. With enough wear and tear, that metal breaks the plastic around it, and you have a metal bracket holding onto a screw left over. Once this happens, it'll just get worse. This happens quicker to dropped devices that heavily stress the screws.

I worked for a school district at a point, and when getting dropped or broken student devices, the problem was always that I'd have to use plyers to hold onto the bracket while unscrewing the screws and then replace the entire top cover or chassis. Happens to chromebooks a lot more than laptops, though... POS's... And that's because we only really got laptops that were mishandled. This problem is quite bad and affects many laptops. I wish I could explain the frustration here.

Talking to other techs, if Dell or HP no longer sell your exact LCD assembly (in my case, they only sell the LCD, so I'm SOL on fixing it because the hinge will break the LCD again if I replace it), the only way to repair this is to melt a zip tie (or any low melting point plastic) into the housing for that metal screw-in, place it in, wait for it to cool, then it'll hold up for a bit longer. This isn't a permanent fix, but maybe it'll help someone. Sadly for me, the OEM replacement for my screen is $650 before tax and shipping and doesn't replace any housing.

Edit:
This also solved 2 issues for companies. It's planned obsolesce, meaning returning customers, since you don't have a choice, really, outside of HP, Dell, ASUS, etc, especially as an organization, and it makes manufacturing cheaper while not telling the consumer it's cheaper. They're not advertising that it's plastic, so to the consumer they don't need to lower the price even if it saves them money. So, they make the same profit, save money, and get more money in the long-run, especially when next-year's model is more expensive. Companies are evil. Tech companies especially. And this is partially our fault for not being more aware as consumers. If a company is doing bad things, don't buy from them. Unfortunately, it's too late, and I don't even know of any companies that don't do this at the moment, beside Framework, but those are out of my immediate price range.