And we would wear those things out, I swear! :-)

I think Americans think British people drink tea out of poshness, when it is the opposite. Most of us also like a posh tea now and then, some of us drink expensive leaf teas... but the majority of what we drink is optimised for fast brewing off boiling water: tea that goes black in the mug in thirty seconds in boiling water.

There is a concept here of "builders tea" -- the kind of thing a builder drinks -- which is sort of the functional equivalent of cheap electric coffee-pot coffee. That is, it's the kind you know isn't the best, but you will still drink it, and that cuts across all class lines. [0]

There is a parallel thing: the "tea urn", which is like an enormous samovar with a lever -- that you still will see in industrial canteens and at church coffee mornings and at gatherings that aren't at cafés or restaurants. Those things actually need a different kind of tea, which brews more slowly and at slightly lower temperatures. The end result is a bit like builders tea. But we wouldn't bother with them at home.

[0] We do absolutely drink coffee at home, but aside from appalling instant coffee we tend to skip over the coffee-pot coffee in the UK, to slightly more expensive ways of making coffee or to dreadful Nespresso machines. You'll see more of those or Bialetti mokas here; old style electric coffee pot percolators are now rather unusual. But Alan Adler's Aeropress particularly caught on here among coffee nerds, because that is really compatible with electric kettle life.