Let's see. Features I want on a refrigerator. Frost free is a big one. Having grown up with a fridge that wasn't frost free and seeing the spectacular mess that you had to make every few months to clean up the build up of ice is no fun. Ice maker is very nice. Far better temperature controls. FAR more efficient. Filters and lights that kill bacteria. That old fridge, over its lifetime, costs you far more than one that you keep for about 15 years. You can hard disagree all you like, but, math is still math.
This myth that "things in the past are so much better" is just that. A myth. Created by people who want to ignore facts and instead insist that anything new is automatically bad and suspect. That any change is being done to "gouge the customer" and make more money for the company.
On rare occasions, some part of the "myth" is true, but almost always in ways that aren't actually positive.
As an example, in the past, cars were often built out of steel, and pretty solid steel at that. This made them quite durable, and meant that even a severe car crash often would not "total" the car (making repair more expensive than replacement). Now, cars are much more often made of aluminum, with lots of air gaps, usually supplemented with light composite materials. This means even a relatively mild crash can cause significant damage to the vehicle, and a major one will usually total a vehicle.
If your
only standard of value is "how long the car will last before you absolutely, positively HAVE to replace it", then old cars are better. But if you care about other, incredibly minor and niche things like "likelihood the occupants survive a crash" or "fuel efficiency" or "lower cost", suddenly the new way is way, way, way better. Being full of all those air gaps? Yeah that makes the car
crumple on impact, rather than acting like a rigid body that transfers all of that kinetic energy to the Ugly Bags of Mostly Water inside--meaning the
car is a lot more likely to die, but we fleshbags are much more likely to live. Being made of aluminum, plastic, and carbon-fiber makes vehicles much, much lighter now than the past--which means the same engine can push the car at a faster speed, or can push the car at a given fixed speed by burning less fuel. And the cost savings is pretty obvious: steel is cheaper per ton, but you need far less weight of aluminum in the new model than you needed steel in the old one, producing a net savings.
And this isn't even getting to one of the actual serious problems behind the "everything in the past was so much better" myth--which is that the only things that DO survive into the modern day are the ones that were that durable. Of course you're not going to see a bazillion crap-butt refrigerators that went kaput 40 years ago.
They've been thrown away or recycled!
All this to say: you are 100% right and it's extremely irritating when people trot out this myth as though it were true. In almost all cases, it's MUCH less true than people think, and even in the (uncommon) cases that it has any truth at all, it's usually a good thing, not a bad one.
