Countless millions of $$$ and engineering hours have been spent to make electronic devices all products as disposable as possible[...]
Depends which sector you are looking at. Everything consumer is ... consumed and therefore not intended anymore to be repaired by definition. One reason some consumer products are still modular, kind of repairable are based on concerns around warranty repairs and logistics. Biggest problem with that is when things do not run as design intended it. I also don´t think that the worst examples serve as representative for the majority neither do overconfident design engineers actually know what they are talking about.
But yes, most people do not spend time repairing electronics, because if it is production equipment you need to have a fallback part anyway - nothing beats replacement measured in time. If it is not a production equipment, it is ... comfort? So repair falls into the niche of special cases in which repair beats renewal, e.g. the vehicle ECU repair or you are trying to troubleshoot a whole design, not a single device. Most people want to be cost-effective with their hard earned money.
I generally don´t chime in on the planned obsolescence choir, as production tolerances, changes in the environment a device is used in and unforeseen causes require compensation by derating (or over building - depending on which side of the fence you are). Without a doubt there are very bad design decisions, from software based hardware protection features to wrongful assumptions about "what is normal" to outright too cheap to perform, or wear parts without a maintenance plan. OTOH it is questionable if the consumers expectation of lifespan actually matches the price tag and those of the competition.
The market achieves to make itself worse either way, after all. German TV set manufacturers built devices that lasted very long, were repair friendly, but might have cut themselves off new sales by making them too durable. As it turns out, there is no unlimited growth. They are also said to not have made the switch to flat panels on time. So they went the way of the dodo, as some cell phone manufacturers did.
If you are talking about intentional destruction, that would need a condition which leaves a pattern that could not be explained by bad design decisions regarding their natural spread (based on factors that cause spread). If you are in that sort of camp, come up with some data logging solution, a website where people could enter which device had which defect under which circumstances (just like insurance companies keep huge data sets - and could exclude the insurance of certain devices under their terms or resell to manufacturers).
So yeah, it's a war, we're losing it and the except minor things nothing will be repairable around 2030, mark my words.
Nope, this is simply a case of psychology for groups of people under market rules, not a big plan or an everlasting development. Nothing else.
If next week e.g. piles of trash or faulty devices burning down houses become a political problem, then you need a different set of rules. Which is why i think the EU does handle such questions with the necessary amount of foresight.
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