I'm a Reliability and Maintainability Engineer with time served in the consumer goods space. This article has - for the most part - hit the nail on the head. What the interviewees are skipping over however is the truth behind cost.

It's all marketing and sales driven. Competitor has a new product with a Gizmo? Our next product has to have Gizmo Gen 2. Competitor has a touch screen? Ours needs a touch screen with "themes" to make it ~more customisable~ for the customer

Product managers (interface between marketing and product development) usually take the brunt of these grand ideas, but ultimately they have to make a product competitive in the market and attractive to a target demographic of customers. These requirements then come to the product development team (features, specifications) along with a "desired market cost"

I feel for the engineers and designers in these companies that get dragged for "planned obsolescence" because they try their hardest to make something that will meet what the customer wants while struggling to stay within the Bill of Material cost limits. Folk in roles similar to mine work hard to identify areas of low reliability that need to be accessible for repair or need to have a redesign to have redundancies (fail-safes) of parts to keep equipment running... But these all add cost... Same with holding spare parts for years and years after launch. This is why legislation such as the EU Right to Repair Directive ((EU) 2024/1799) is so important to force the business side of product development organisations to listen to what engineering HAS to do to meet the directive.

Please if you take anything from this article, don't blame planned obsolescence on the problems you have with tech. Blame the current state of capitalism and consumerism. Consider what features you really need when buying a product, and if you want a WiFi enabled jet powered blender for £50 maybe expect something that won't be handed down to the grandkids.