Cost Improvement (CI) project:
Reviewing the BOM, putting in lower cost components.
Reviewing the enclosure, finding cheaper injection molding vendors.
Reviewing the manufacturing, finding cheaper plants.
I see all three of these done on OP's (defective) meter.
Gone are the blue Vishay precision resistors, the carbon-comp input resistor, the high-quality solder mask PCB, change to elcheapo DB104 bridge rectifier etc.
Moving the plastics fab, i.e. someone else is making it- the text silkscreen is skinny, the input jack frame and oops we changed from red to gray due to a mistake.
It all indicates a change to another vendor, loss of quality control, cheapening of the product.