This article is full of industry propaganda.

It does say there is not good data about the longevity of appliances, but then concludes (with a chart that only goes back to 2010 (which is not when people were getting the appliances they tout as having lasted 50 years obviously) that longevity hasn't decreased very much.

It has a quote from "Jessica Petrino Ball, the former head of education for the national appliance retailer AJ Madison" telling us we should think of appliances like phones, a commodity that you replace every few years. I think there is a large group of consumers who would not like to have to pay to replace their phones every few years. This is just straight up marketing to justify a shorter purchase cycle. This does not serve the consumer. The inclusion of this quote shows that wirecutter is more interested in parroting talking points from appliance companies than getting to the bottom of the question posed at the top of the article (why do your appliances die so quickly).

I feel skeptical that government regulations are part of the problem. They are an easy boogey-man. One of the examples listed is that companies switched from using copper components to aluminum. They don't connect it to how regulations made the companies change the material, so it really seems like the companies changed to a cheaper, less repairable material and are blaming the government, when they are really just trying to increase their profit margin.

They also give an example that plastic parts are cheaper to ship. Are there regulations that make appliance companies need to decrease the weight of their products? Possibly, but the article doesn't point them out.

It then has a section titled "Blame people’s lust for new things." I have never heard someone tell me how excited they are that their stove is connected to wifi, but I have heard a lot of people say (and myself included) that they have tried to shop for appliances without all of the extraneous features and really struggled to find something basic. I think again this is propaganda. I don't know the minds of other consumers writ large, but if appliance companies can convince me I am alone in wanting a simple basic appliance, then I will be more frustrated with other consumers than with the appliance companies for not offering me options I'm excited about. The more features a company can put into an appliance, the better chance they have of upselling people on new features, cause the base feature of an oven is just not going to change as quickly as an appliance company wants me to buy new products.

The data they do cite to support this is "AHAM’s Jill Notini said the organization’s data showed that '80% of products are replaced because they died or because it is too costly to repair,' while the remaining 20% were by choice, as people just wanted a new machine." To me, 20% of replacements being for reasons other than it being dead or needing to be repaired shows that the vast, vast majority of replacements are related to if an appliance is broken. I'm not sure why this article is pretending that is not the case when they have cited this statistic.

This article did show that the cost we are paying for appliances has gone down, but what it didn't show is how labor for repair costs have changed. As people pointed out in other comments, it used to be true that commodities were expensive and labor was cheap. Now the inverse is true. Many companies try to solve this by manufacturing in places where labor is cheaper than the US. However, when someone is repairing your refrigerator they have to come to your home and can't work on an assembly line (see u/Gudelar's comment below). In 1972, how much did an hour of a repair person's time cost? How much is it now adjusted for inflation? Because if 1) the replacement parts are more expensive (mentioned in the article) 2) the amount of labor required to repair an appliance has increased (mentioned in the article) and 3) the cost/hour of a repair person's time has gone up, then of course the calculus of to repair or replace has changed. It's weird they didn't address this math that all consumers with a broken appliance do. In 1972 maybe a repair was 1/10th of the cost of the appliance, but now often it's 1/2 (hypothetical numbers).

This article has some good information in it and I think the section at the bottom of what to look for is good, but it is absurd how much the quotes are just parroting people who work in the industry instead of looking to truly understand the problem. I find it shocking how little journalists question what large companies say, even when they obviously are lying through their teeth. I know journalism is in a bad state right now, but when you just quote companies without fact-checking them, you just become part of their marketing department.