My grand parents live in an old farm-house, 100 years old or more. When that house was built - there was no electricity. That had been added later - and you could still see where channels had been hewn into the wall to put in cables and later plastered over again.

But everything electrical in that house was repairable to a degree that seems unimaginable today.

For example, every single power plug had screws. If you removed those, it would come apart in two halves, to reveal another set of screws that held the cable in. If you undid those screws, you could easily shorten or replace the cable - in case it was broken. There was no glue, no solder, and most of the plugs had even metal inserts for the screws to go into.

The appliances on the other end of the cables were just as easy to take apart and put back together. And their insides were (mostly) free of proprietary parts - almost everything was "standard" stuff, that you could get replacements for, from a supplier of your own choice.

Many of those appliances still worked perfectly fine, after my grandparents had died, and the house had been torn down. That doesn't mean they never broke - but if they did, my grandpa was able to easily fix them himself. And if he could not fix something, he still was able to salvage it for parts that then could be used to fix other things.