system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
The other thing about "things used to be built better than they are now" is survivorship bias.

A furnace in a house was put in in 1945.  It lasted sixty years, until 2005.  The replacement furnace only lasted until 2020.  Too bad people don't make things as well as the old ones.

Unless it is that all the other furnaces in the neighborhood that were installed in 1945 were replaced in 1960, and this one just randomly happened to last forever.

It seems to me that the range of quality of things that are manufactured is probably about the same now as it was in 1980, 1960, 1860, 1500.  It's just that all the crap from back then already broke.
gpt
It's not just that. The furnace built in 1945 was sand-casted cast iron. It was cheap, but it couldn't do thin parts with any reliability, so everything was thick and heavy. Poor castings would fail almost immediately, because they had cracks as soon as they cooled from casting. So they were stupidly heavy, insanely overbuilt, and atrociously inefficient. They were also expensive for what they were because of that. 

Now, you can have something made of 1/64" thick metal with a 99+% pass rate. 

So, yes, it's survivor bias, but also the shitty methods of manufacture meant you needed insane safety factors by today's standards to avoid premature failure due to manufacturing flaws. So, if you wasn't a product that 99% of them coming off the line could last 5 years, you had to overbuild them so much that 95% of them would last 50 years.