I once watched an interview with Paul Reed Smith where he posited that vintage per se is a red herring in musical instrument sound (though the same principles apply to all manufactured products). As an example, he used The Wind Cries Mary to point out that the best sound (in his opinion) ever captured on tape was completely produced by and recorded with equipment that was less than 12 moths old. His point was that nobody penny pinched in those days so that you could buy an off-the-shelf guitar that was basically what today would be considered a custom shop job.

The analogy to the change in the music industry breaks down a little here, because in addition to just point of sale price pressure, you also have the efficiency standards you need to meet in the appliance business. But maybe the solution to that is that you need to take in total life cycle emissions when evaluating the efficiency of a product. Because I guarantee that a 1947-built product of any efficiency beats the shit out of a 2009-built product at any efficiency. That's one of the points that's completely and totally lost in the transition-as-quickly-as-possible-to-EVs debate: a used pickup from 1985 that gets 15 mgp is probably more efficient than any freshly produced EV from a life-cycle POV. And yet we don't incentivize anyone to keep getting their cars fixed. How about $1000/yr tax credit for every year you don't buy a car after the car is 7 years old?