@ryo @digdeeper A lot of stuff was. Particularly when electronics were expensive to make regardless, and consumerism wasn't as strong, so you really had to convince people to buy things even though they were expensive. Still, if you look at cars, as an example, a lot of western cars did not hold up as well as Soviet cars, that were just built with all stat points dumped in durability and all skill points dumped in healing.

As far as I can tell, when the west peaked, there was a balance between making things reliable but also nice, and making them nice required a little more complexity, which reduces reliability at least a bit. While the Soviet stuff that I looked at prioritized simplicity even more.

Also worth mentioning that Japan surpassed the west and made better stuff than pretty much any other country. The people that I heard talk about it seem to agree that Japanese technology peaked in the late 80s and early 90s. Also worth mentioning that Japanese cars from that time are still great to have, while their western counterparts are more likely to be money pits.

Anyway, for the most part, quality really went downhill in the 90s, though in the 80s, things were already being made cheaper, though still good by today's very low standards. The 90s being the first real decade of cheap crap had the advantage that we were able to have computers back in the day when maybe we couldn't have before, but the quality of a lot of stuff was absolutely atrocious. Even good stuff, like video game consoles, were getting complicated enough to be less reliable, particularly because of optical drives (though you can just mod all that away, today).

Hell, I was born in the early 90s and already grew up with shitty rubber dome keyboards, while a few years earlier people were using real switches. In the case of IBM, before rubber domes, buckling springs, that were an inferior and cheaper version of capacitive buckling springs, that were a cheaper and arguably inferior version of beamspring switches.

So, you could already see the trend back then. It doesn't help that back in the day, computers got so much faster so quickly that replacing components somewhat often was actually worth it. And nowadays people still replace computers all the time, but there is no need for that at all, because the growth is not nearly as crazy as it used to be.