A lot of the "planned obsolescence" perspective is tainted by survivorship bias. The whole "they don't make things like they used to," bit is ignoring the fact that garbage quality appliances existed back in the day too.
You can still buy high quality appliances, but not many people want to drop over $200 on a toaster (the adjusted price in 1950). And not many people want to get appliances repaired when they can just get another garbage product for $20.
I highly doubt most appliance manufacturers are intentionally designing their products to fail at a certain point. It's more likely that the engineers are given a profit margin goal and have to use parts with a lower MTBF to fit within it.
But companies are responsible for training people to think that way.