I have just realised that "nobody wants to work any more" is true, but the 'nobody' in this case is large companies.
They don't want to do any of the things which aren't absolutely essential to getting a product slapped together and shoved out the door so they can get your money. They don't want to do testing, write documentation, train their staff, provide support, give a good customer experience, none of it. Anything they can automate, or farm out to third parties, even if the results are terrible, they will. Because it's cheaper and all they care about is making the number go up.
Usually there is a way to contact support/customer service (eventually) but when you do, they can't actually help due to having not had sufficient training to know anything and not having the ability to escalate anything. All most of them can do is read the meaningless blather off the company's web site for you.
But more and more they just don't provide any way to contact them. There's no law which says they have to, is there?
And what else are you going to do, go with a competitor? Even if a viable competitor exists, they're all the same.
Go without the thing? Good luck with that, a lot of this stuff has become essential to modern life.
I mean none of that is new information, it's just that I hadn't thought of it in those terms before.
Yes. What really brought it home to me was finding out that we have shortages of critically important medicine because the pharma companies just stopped making it. "Financially disincentivized" was the phrase. Old reliable drugs aren't nearly as profitable as newly patented ones, so why bother?