Interesting, I believe this although I stopped using mine many generations ago after losing it and not replacing it. I feel like there's been a big shift in recent years from Fitbit being a market leader to people preferring other wearables - either smartwatches like Apple's or Garmin's, or more use case-specific wearables like Whoop or the Oura ring for sleep.

I worked at Salesforce years ago on a customer support product they were using. They mentioned many people never used their Fitbit, but still somehow a third of users had to contact them over a hardware issue.

That made me think basically everyone who used it heavily eventually had a hardware problem.

Google doesn't care. people will buy them based on the Fitbit name, good quality or bad.

They used to be reliable until Google bought the company. I'll never buy another piece of Google hardware after my last Fitbit. It lasted 18 months and they declined to replace it since their warranty is even shorter. I refuse to buy disposable electronics.