Comment by re-thc

> Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias

It's still a thing today though? It's not survivorship bias. Take the Microwave example. In a lot of countries it is very hard to buy just a traditional (convection) Microwave now. They force these 4-in-1 or an inverter Microwave.

> leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day

It says nothing about "quality". So continuing, yes the inverter Microwaves are "quality", offer more control and costs more but due to all the complexity dies way faster. A lot of them die in <3 years when the traditional 1s last way longer. Back in the day we only had convection Microwaves. The end.

> This is a common myth that was debunked a while back.

By who? By you? Another example - SSDs have been made to not last as long. We went from SLC -> MLC -> TLC -> QLC etc. The writes were reduced. Did the consumers want this? No. There just wasn't much "choice". Top of line Samsung consumer SSDs just changed. During COVID some vendors sneakily adjusted it too. So, yes quality went worse. Deliberately.