A year ago I had very similar concerns, but now I'm a happy user of a 16" Macbook Pro. Yes, the silly touchbar is still there, but with a hardware Escape key I can tolerate it. Is there anything else lacking for you from a 16" model?
A couple of batteries died for no apparent reason on machines newer than 6 months, I think one screen failure was due to bad thermal design (hot airstream vs connector), we've had keyboards crapping out and the fans tend to be on constantly when running workloads that are more than "mostly idling".
Even though the batteries are glued down, we stared doing those repairs ourselves. But anything that requires an inventory of dubiously sourced parts tends to mean a bad, time-consuming and expensive repair job at some authorized shop - and most of the time they don't actually repair stuff; they chuck the board in the bin, put in a new one and make you pay for it.
How do you cope with the thermal throttling? Or do you run light loads?
And whether your claim of their outsourcing is true or not, Apple is still on the hook for warranty on the repairs. I highly doubt it’s common.
Lastly Apple has by far the highest customer satisfaction in the industry in a good part because of how they handle repairs.
How many Macbooks, iPads and iPhones have you sent off for repair?