I usually just tell people to get their cvt fluid changed on schedule or sooner because its a steel belt and it does wear and shed metal particles.
I've seen about a dozen, and I only know about a dozen Nissan owners. In fact, I've yet to meet a long time Nissan CVT owner who didn't have significant CVT related issues, even if they allegedly did the maintenance on time. Because...
> its a steel belt and it does wear and shed metal particles.
They're so worried about the wear on a battery meanwhile this has a part that's constantly producing metal wear particles inside the transmission practically by design. The transmission will fail, and it'll probably be pretty destructive when it goes. At least from the dozen or so examples I've personally seen.
The manual may say replace your cvt fluid at 100k miles, but that average includes all the old grannies that you regularly pass on your way to work. For some drivers it should be replaced twice as often due to driving patterns, just like engine oil should, but that isn't well advertised unfortunately and I think it leads to a lot of failures.
But the wear caused from dirty transmission oil increases exponentially so there is a point where you can go from "transmission is perfectly fine" to "the transmission is totally fucked" pretty rapidly. I could see how that is seen as a flaw still, but others could argue that it is simply a maintenance issue. Just like the many engines where timing belt failures can cause engine destruction.
If they're operating properly there should be almost no actual metal on metal contact. "Fluid bearings" and all. It's an important aspect to how long the life of modern engines are. If you actually have metal on metal on most engine components it won't last much longer.
A CVT requires metal on metal friction to function at its most basic level. Your transmission is ultimately a war component, designed to fail.
You might as well argue the same about batteries. If you don't overly rely on DCFC, if you don't discharge them too much, if you stay in the 20-80% range mostly, if you're not constantly doing high-amperage pulls ("If you don't rag on them"), etc. Take care of it and it'll last a long time. Stress it out all the time and it'll wear out quick.
I'm not arguing batteries aren't an expensive wear component. They are, and they are largely the wear component to care about on a used one. I'm just pointing out CVT are also an expensive wear component. It's a double standard to be OK with one while acting like the other is some odd uncommon issue. But in the end one you can usually plug in an OBD reader in and know the actual health of the battery, the other requires you trusting the owner cared and that they and you aren't just unlucky or have an extensive tear down from a mechanic.