I think it might be more about how much contact your keyboard has to particulates. The primary mode of failure has to do with dust/crumbs/etc getting into the mechanism. It's not impossible to imagine that people who type in more particulate-rich environments have frequent keyboard issues.

But that's still victim blaming. There are plenty of keyboard designs which are not this fragile, and you shouldn't have to dust-proof your workspace to avoid hardware failures. We're not making CPUs here.

One thing I found is that the reliability issues are usually quite fleeting. I have the feeling that a lot of the people who are experiencing issues are going to the Apple store straight away to get it fixed. I've had a few issues: 5 key stopped working properly, space stopped working properly a couple times, same for f key, where by properly I meant it needed more effort to get the keypress out, however every time the issue resolved itself in 2 or 3 days of use (presumably by the typing breaking up whatever dust had gotten itself under there)

They are definitely unreliable and shouldn't break so easy, but every issue I've had has resolved itself

I'm still using my 2011 macbook pro. The 2018 mbp I use for work started double- and triple- typing spaces within 4 months.