Planned Obsolescence? Really?

https://www.earthlaws.org.au/psa/ 

     Owning a house involves maintaining the house. With the turn of the century, it seems things need maintaining more often. Also, maintaining things seems to have become replacing things.
     Our house is really a great house. It is 20 years old and we love the architect designed space and flow of the floor plan. We are on our second set of furnaces and air conditioners. Even more remarkably, we are on our third set of water heaters. We bought a freezer in 2007 and it died and had to be replaced this year. The range has a ventilation fan for our countertop range. It went kaput and needs to be replaced as the parts to repair it are no longer available.
     The water heaters are $1,200 wholesale. The furnaces and air conditioners were approximately $3,000 each. The range fan is also $3,000. The freezer was a bargain at a measly $550. None of these items could be repaired. The furnaces and air conditioners were so expensive to repair that no one would do it. The water heaters and freezer could not be repaired because of the way they were designed. Therefore, everything had to be replaced. I think we only replaced one water heater and one furnace (oil burner) in my first twenty years of home ownership. That number has been eclipsed in the second two decades.
      This all offends me as Quality professional. It reminds me of a concept that I thought was long gone from the world of product development, namely, Planned Obsolescence which per Google is defined as:

a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design, termination of the supply of spare parts, and the use of nondurable materials.

     This definition fits perfectly to each of the appliances I have mentioned.
      I am keenly aware that our appliances and gadgets are more complicated these days and thus potentially more prone to failure. I understand that to keep prices competitive, there is a relentless effort to reduce costs. This means using less material for the same function and using less expensive materials. There is a limit to how much cost can be reduced before quality and reliability suffer. I believe we are way past that threshold and the part of quality that we have traded off for price containment is durability and repairability.
     Has this been done on purpose? Is there some devious intent behind this? I do not think so. I believe it is an unintended consequence of trying to provide energy efficient products laden with features at the lowest possible prices. This results in products that work quite well but have shorter life-spans. I would rather have a few less features, perhaps even pay a little more, for quality base functionality with impressive durability.
     I do believe we a third wave quality and reliability revolution. The first was in 1920s and 30s when Walter Shewhart developed the system of Quality Control. The second was Post World War II when the Japanese created their system of Quality Management. We need to be on the brink of a third wave to create products that last longer with lower cost of total ownership. The products need to be repairable, perhaps even like automobiles, with a maintenance schedule designed to ensure operational quality with exceptional reliability and durability. The manufacturers that can do this will shake-up the market as Toyota did to Ford and GM in the 1970s and 80s.