Stakes are 100% the reason most tech is crap. You can't get away with shipping buggy hardware, people would ask for their money back. You can't get away with shipping a medical device that hurts people, you'd get sued. You can't get away with building a car that randomly turns on the brakes while you're going 70MPH, nobody would buy your cars (and you'd get sued).
With consumer software, there are no stakes. The business knows it can make money with buggy software. The developers know the business doesn't care. In fact, most people in the business don't seem to care if it works at all. The only time they care is if there is a legal consequence, or if they will get fired. They are not always stupid, but they are always lazy.
And that is never going to change. There are parts of this world that are perfectly acceptable as just being shitty, and at least 95% of software in the world fits into that. Things don't get better without a motivation.
Not necessarily, but the cure could be worse than the disease.
The problem is that the stakes are getting higher and higher for all software. Every app developer is trying to turn their program into a PID collector, and they are storing the PID in leaky buckets.
I mean, why would I get an account setup screen to play a solitaire game? Sheesh.
But politicians and bureaucracies have a nasty habit of imposing fairly ridiculous and/or out-of-date remedies.
They could make it a requirement to fax your PID to play solitaire.
People do care but there is a lack of choice. Then you have another issue with enterprise software is the people who are using the software are generally not the ones buying it. It comes down to does it check the right boxes.
Business do care it is just much more difficult than people realize to make software simple and easy to use. Then you have the fact most software projects fail and way over budget so they think there is no other way. Therefore they end up settling since at least they got something that sort of works which is better than nothing.
Well, nothing is perfect and hardware is no exception. We'll have to admit that all projects have 3 primary constraints: time, resource and scope and one core yield: quality.
The nature of defects/bugs is really miss-map of expectations to implementations, it does not really matter it's software or hardware and hardware bugs are possibly more fatal than software bugs in some situations. There are lots of examples: Therac-25, Infinia Hawkeye 4, Boeing 737 Max, and almost all recent Intel/AMD CPUs, which are more relevant to this topic. You can see that it's really hard to tell whether it's should be software or hardware defects, either way there would be valid points to argue otherwise.
Nonetheless, I do agree your assertion that "Stakes are 100% the reason most tech is crap.". As a result of the limitation mentioned earlier, there must be some trade off or you can never wrap up the project. Stakes just make things worse and they tends to push engineers to cut corners in pursuing profits. The only thing looks better for hardware is that if you went too far cutting corners, it will not work stably at best or even does not work at all. For software, defects can easily be covered up and the end user might not have noticed it in the first place.
With consumer software, there are no stakes. The business knows it can make money with buggy software. The developers know the business doesn't care. In fact, most people in the business don't seem to care if it works at all. The only time they care is if there is a legal consequence, or if they will get fired. They are not always stupid, but they are always lazy.
And that is never going to change. There are parts of this world that are perfectly acceptable as just being shitty, and at least 95% of software in the world fits into that. Things don't get better without a motivation.