Your statement is valid for individuals. But as a society, we could value reparability. And laws are there to enforce what the society values, not the selfish individuals you and me are part of.
That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes with a cost, values are encoded as trade offs between desirable outcomes, rather than the desirable outcomes themselves. When some desirable outcome is not obtained in society, almost always the reason is that there are other tradeoffs being made. So society values affordability, competition, performance, longevity, quality, repairability, customizability -- and that's just on the product side. Then these product trade offs compete against things like labor market protections, use of resources for competing products, etc.
When Apple decides to solder RAM into the motherboard, it is making a trade off between performance and repairability. When Tesla chooses megacasting that might result in a fender bender totaling your car, they are choosing reliability and lower production costs over repairability. Just bemoaning that some product is less repairable and that society values repairability so therefore some dark force must be working to subvert society's values is not a useful or insightful analytical approach. Everything boils down to tradeoffs.
10 mm vs 7-8 mm for class leading phones. Maybe the Xcover Pro is rugged enough to use it without a case/sleeve ("Drop-to-concrete resistance from up to 1.5 m"), so it might end up being thinner in practice.
It's definitely thicker. But not double.
Why should the rest of us pay for your preferences?
Why should _we_ pay for _your_ preferences?
Yours is the position of applying state force to make them do something they don't want to - the burden to justify is entirely yours.
A big enough majority of people wants it, anyway, to vote for representatives that write these laws. I'm sure there is a small minority of oppressed Randians who suffer terribly from all of this.
That is the reason why Microsoft was able to dominate the desktop market. Now wonder, the number of professionals on the desktop market is low. Despite the harmful effects of the UNIX-Wars, Linux managed slowly to take leadership of servers, super-computing and some professional devices (Lenovo ThinkPads, Dell Developer Edition).
Naturally some consumer test boards would hint on long term effects and consumers would adapt ("Don't buy car X from Z, it has problems with the engine after 40.000 km.") computing is very fast changing and one bad decision can bound you for years. A large base of Windows users cannot switch, they are not able to switch because they bought sadly hardware from a vendor with not open drivers, or a specially crafted bureaucracy. Of course XMPP existed and was more secure but WhatsApp was more comfortable. And even despite Signal is better, they sheer group pressure is extreme. And your Apple-Music account and all the invested money on the App-Store and your GMAIL-Account...
Interesting enough, if you don't buy the most expensive device you get replaceable batteries. If you buy rough phones ("professional") you get replaceable batteries.
Industry is quite good teaching leymans what the have to buy "blingbling" and then just lock-in the buyers. Of course they would appreciate repair ability - they just don't know it better at time. It actually US which fail to help them before they are in the next trap. Schools now using foreign clouds and Zoom. Holy...why we failed to show them Matrix and Jitsi? Why we didn't improved comfort?
>But as a society, we could value reparability
Only if there is large enough individuals who value reparability.
>And laws are there to enforce what the society values
That laws exist when there is enough individuals to support it.