[outworlder]

> My mother in-law has two sewing machines. One of them is one of the first electronic sewing machines (from the 70s) and one is much older. Guess which one still works like a charm?

There's a bit of survivorship bias and N=1 here.

I'm old enough to remember machines full of relays and discrete components that failed pretty often and required a lot of troubleshooting with schematics on hand. Modern appliances – if built out of decent components – have a much better shot at surviving long term. Less discrete components that can fail, more debugging capabilities, logic that's implemented in a rock solid processor rather than an unreliable mess of digital gates (or worse, analog logic).

There's obviously a point where there are diminishing returns, and probably another one where more complexity actually decreases reliability.

> Smart things would ideally just revert back to being functional dumb things (rather than bricks) if their electronics fail.

If possible, yes. That's only really an option for simple devices.