Nope. Things are better made these days. Even the low end.
There was a spike in failures when everyone moved to unleaded solder with RoHS and tooling and materials science hadn’t yet evolved, but that was resolved well-within 5 years.
If your sampling seems odd, there’s something in your particular process. Perhaps you’re buying too much used gear without demoing first?
Yeah I think stuff is getting worse. It’s just the push to get more stuff out and sold + the we can fix it in software later.
It’s adobe photoshop syndrome, I don’t know where it’s at now but PS always had heaps of bugs that would never get fixed, they’d just push out more and more features 99% of people never used.
The CEO of the time basically said they weren’t interested in fixing bugs because big shiny new features is what sold products.
Now I look more closely at the brand’s history of shipping stuff that works and providing timely updates/bugfixes.