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That’s an illusion. Could you, in the mid-’70s, repair a vacuum tube? A capacitor? No. You threw it away and got a new one, and you didn’t care how it worked inside. Older artisans were probably even then horrified by the ‘new’ age of people who didn’t know how to properly blow glass bulbs.

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Not really relevant to the parent's valid point.

Maybe you couldn't repair the switch, potentiometer or the valve, but you could nearly always buy a standard replacement. From just about any suitable shop. Chances are the same switches and valves were used in dozens of products and makes, and there would be third party alternatives - cheaper with shorter life. Sure, there were a few uncommon specialist tubes in some things, but they were hugely outnumbered by standard components.

Now everything is specific and moulded to fit just one product. You try to buy a Sony XYZ1244/a switch, and find Sony don't make that part available, and it's custom moulded to only fit that one particular product. Maybe you can buy a switch as part of the whole control module that includes it, and a bunch of custom ICs at £99. Or maybe not as you're not an approved Sony repair shop.

When a part is botched it is botched, though - story time - I did more than once repair power transistors and valves with broken off legs. But that doesn't really matter, the idea was that parts were exchangeable between different manufacturers and that nowadays almost everything except a handful of passive components is custom made for that particular device. I understand the economics, but it does not help for serviceability or learning from what you are looking at. Good luck tracing the schematic of even a small IC, I spent hours taking apart color tv's and sketching the schematics of their guts to understand how it all worked.

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