They absolutely do it on purpose, and just so their dealers can make more money. It's honestly become a game of redneck and hacker vs big corporations, and it's being litigated and legislated as we speak (been going on years now). Basically the design is done so the parts have a set time frame for when they are to fail (that's the literal purpose of engineering but they're getting really good at it), and large corps like apple have lost class action lawsuits over it when the scheme works too well. They also design in unnecessary complexity just so the average guy can't figure it out, or require special tooling just to fix it. Perfect example: this bullshit I'm trying to fix on this jeep patriot.
The vehicle has a speed sensor on each tire, which allows it to use a computer to have abs, traction control, and a so called 4x4. It has a front and rear wiring harness with all the components integrated so you have to replace the whole thing, and the rear ones go in the housing from the axle side, so you have to completely disassemble the whole thing just to get to it. It's in a pocket so its a nightmare to work on and it'll hold water and salt (like the old school ford leaf spring hangers), and a small sheet metal clip holds it in place. When it comes loose it throws all sorts of lights and will limit the speed to 45 or so, maybe even applying brakes sporadically and other randomness.
By the time it rusts out the housing is pretty rusted too, and so simply replacing the harness that snakes everywhere won't work because it attaches to sheet metal that's curved so the angle is wrong. The actual designed fix is to replace the entire wheel assembly and speed sensor harness, which of course means pulling the damn axle, not even counting the might as well replace both sides part
The redneck fix, which I'm obviously going to attempt because I'm not trying to spend half a weeks wages and a ton of time to replace unnecessary parts is to fabricate a new sheet metal bracket to hold the damn thing in place, and then jacking both rears up and spinning it by hand so you can manually align it and check it with a multimeter to confirm that it's reading right before you put it all back together.
