Don't know if you've owned e.g. a 1980s Toyota Corolla in an environment that's always-wet, always-salted for six months a year like Western Norway.
The difference to modern cars is night and day: The Corolla rusts to death in five years, as in you can stick your whole arm through the holes in the wheel well if the structural integrity of the chassis doesn't fail first. Whereas most cars produced after 1990 will last about two decades without owner rustproofing.
You obviously can't dictate that all redox reactions will halt, but the manufacturers have absolutely done something that makes their cars rust slower.
The "end-user rustproofing" we do here generally consists of spraying some super-heavy, super-sticky oil-based coating onto the metal so it doesn't get wet. But this obviously complicates other maintenance.