Every sale has a customer.

Not every customer can assess the quality of a product. I can judge the quality of a violin, but I can't tell you how long the compressor in a refrigerator will last.

This is why the only signal that customers used to have got removed - a refrigerator that had the same design and components for twenty years is likely well made (if it weren’t people would have found out or changed the parts).

But these are rare (one of the few I know of is Speed Queen but I suspect there are others in other industries, mainly commercial/industrial products).

Amusingly enough these work best when innovation is basically dead, so that a new one and a twenty year old one is basically the same.

Except being made well isn't the only criteria. From what I understand, speed queen uses so much water compared to a more modern machine that you could buy a new machine on the cost savings.

There are a multitude of reasons, companies no longer make products to last. Watch videos where they dissect products, you'll find machines are designed to fail after a certain amount of time. Motors that only contain a certain amount of oil and cannot be serviced.

You wind up double and triple washing things with the new machine in order to get equivalent cleanliness to an old style machine.