[stinos]

Is there a good source of data on this?

This. It's not that I don't believe the article per se, but it doesn't come much further than 'technician says' which I find hard to consider as evidence for various reasons. Moreover, and that's the major flaw imo, it talks about 'appliances' as one big group as if all are alike and all brands and price ranges behave the same, and gives examples like fridges with icemakers which is a thing which is fairly new in e.g. Europe and I wouldn't buy anyway because I have no need for it.

Would be interesting to see how a plain fridge holds up, how long current 'normal' diswashers and washing machines etc last compared to the past, and that split up per brand/model group/price category. Also because anecdotally I haven't encountered issues, but that could just as well be because my expectation is different or I just had luck or I just happened to buy the right thing. I mean, I have several examples, but just to name one: my expensive cordless drill is now about 17 years old and I got a new battery for it recently making it again as powerful as it used to be. It has had zero issues and I renovated 2 houses with it. Is that expected? Did I just get lucky? I don't know, but price divided by hours of usage this thing costs close to nothing yet works great and for what I'd consider a pretty long time.