I think it's both chicken and egg. It's more expensive to repair relative to replace now, so often it's more economical to replace. This leads to less repair knowledge and services, so increases cost, making replacement easier etc. Many times are more complex and so what used to be repaired with simple tools and know how, now requires specialized tools and proprietary replacement parts. Supply chains being just-in-time for production means many parts are not stocked for repair, which also slows everything down too.

I was lucky enough to find a shoe shop that does really good resoles in my city. Not impossible to repair stuff, just hard

when I lived in the UK there were shoe repairmen everywhere, they were great, and if the repair was easy they wouldn't even charge me.

in the States I haven't seen a single one

Sad, ain't it? I repair all kinds of stuff. Have a 50" TV that only needs a new board when I can afford it. The 55" on my wall needed 2 new capacitors, $8 on eBay.

There's a shoe repair shop in my town. People absolutely do get simple things repaired what you can't get repaired are things like TVs anymore.

But things don't break like they used to, it used to be that a component would fail and you could just replace that broken component but everything's integrated these days so if one thing goes down the whole thing is dead.

Shout out to Bosch... I have a 10-year old dishwasher from them and the drain pump stopped working. It was so easy to replace and readily available. I was actually happy to have it break, all told.

A lot of enshitification has happened in the last decade so no idea if their products are still like that, but when the time comes to get a new one I'll certainly be giving them my first look.

Not least because CRT screens were nigh on bulletproof (and heavy as fuck, containing vacuum reliably needs mass).

CRT "screens" are non-repairable for different reasons, but yeah

Really the most you can hope for these days is to encounter two broken TVs of the same model, with different faults.

Luck holding, this lets you wind up with a single working unit.

Yeah, most of the cost of the TV is the panel. If you’re buying a replacement panel the part would cost basically the same as a new TV (or maybe even more).

By contrast, my parents had a TV that started boot looping the morning after a thunderstorm and they’d had at least one lightning strike very close by. They got a local TV repairman out and he was able to get a replacement mainboard and the TV worked perfectly after that. I think the board was $100 or $150 and his time and labor was $100, coming to their house to do the work. If I remember correctly we could see scorch marks on the bad board near the Ethernet port.

Getting the new board was a bit of a hassle; that manufacturer didn’t sell parts directly and I think it took him 3 tries to get the right board. It seems like they have the same board in a lot of models but they flash them for different screens, so even though they were labeled as being for my parents’ TV it took a few tries to get the right one in. I feel like that’s a problem that would’ve been easier if the manufacturer supported repairs better.

I remember those, but for tape deck heads, not TV's.

Anyway, Scirocco came with the very likely correct analysis, if you can see the other comments in this chain.