[herio]

Recapping is mostly nonsense, there are however some devices out there with electrolytic caps that are known to leak. Some old Amiga and Macs have these issues for example.

From there it seems to have spread out into a "recap everything" craze that is just silly.

[Gordonjcp]

Yeah, exactly, and because it's so popular it's become the "go-to" for any fault - "oh it must be bad caps!" - and then you end up with perfectly good equipment getting ripped apart and cheap shitty Aliexpress electrolytics dropped in to replace perfectly good ones, with lots and lots of really poor soldering, dry joints and lifted pads everywhere. Oh and heaven help any ECOs made to the board, "oh someone had circuit-bent it and added all this blue wire to the back of the board so I took all that off", gawd help us.

The real fault is an 0.1μF disc ceramic, one of those little brown ones, that's gone leaky and now thinks it's a 1k resistor. Not that you'd know, with all the other iatrogenic faults the damn thing now has.

Awful. Just awful. The "it was circuitbent so I tidied it all up" thing was a Prophet 600 that I had to write off, it was so badly damaged.