Things definitely are not as robust as they used to be ,I think its a design requirement to make sure it breaks !
Yes to the first statement, no to the second.
Before the 60's a mechanical lever mechanism, maybe in a window opener, or part of a lawnmower, would be made of thick steel plates. This was because the designer knew a thick steel plate would do the job.
Roll on the years, and computers start to be used to optimise designs. The aforementioned lever is reduced to a thin aluminium sheet, with a some optimised corrugations to give it strength. This 'strength' is just as strong as the thick steel plate, but only along one axis. As the part is not expected to have any stress on any other axis it will last just as long as the steel plate version.
The manufacturer has saved cost on materials. The part is lighter, so cheaper to transport. End result is good allround.
But in the real world, ( not the computer controlled lab environment ), things go a bit off track. Maybe a screw comes loose, or a toddler tries to turn a handle the wrong way. Toddlers are strong !.
Now the lever gets stresses where it wasn't designed to, and it crumples like tissue paper.
In the electronics world we have the scourge of the tantalum capacitor. When these were introduced in the 70's they offered very small size, and with no liquid electrolyte were expected to last forever. They had one drawback, they couldn't withstand overvoltage.
Billions of them went into every kind of domestic and commercial electronic device possible. These devices are built to a price, and it's just not feasible to build in every protection against faults or abuse. A fuse fails in order to protect the upstream supply, but downstream it might cause a transient spike. Or a poorly designed SMPS might occasionally create a HV transient that is too short to notice, and won't have any effect on the circuit it is supplying. Or the device might be subject to an ESD event, again no problem for most of the component.
But the tantalum capacitor sees the transient, and starts to go bad. It might take years for the effect to become apparent, but when it does it can go with a bang, literally. An exploding tant can burn a hole in the PCB !.
So again we have a component that fails because it was exposed to stresses beyond it's design specification.
Modern machines don't fail by design, but by being just 'on the limit' of what is expected of them.
