Right, that's a fair criticism of the business practice, but from an engineering perspective it might not be a terribly unreasonable design. It's a good idea to design a system to fail predictably. Electrical engineers use fuses, mechanical engineers use shear pins, and so on.

Perhaps it was to protect the user, not the machine. If you drop a spoon in, it might break the fuse before pinging it into your face? Or it might have been a sliding contact that needed better wear performance than metal on metal, or it might have been an odd shape that was expensive to make from metal.