I don't dispute this, but at the same time, the cars from Toyota and Honda during the 1980s were vastly higher quality than their American and European counterparts. This could have contributed to the desire to emulate TPS.
Could it be an example of... well not survivorship bias, but, TPS gave them a competitive advantage in the 80's, and since then, other car companies have adopted it or something similar and upped their game, normalizing it to the point where people don't care about it anymore?
That is, once something is normalized you don't notice it anymore. Like how people that saw the 'rona epidemic was under control (ish) thought the measures were no longer needed.
I do think that people have much higher expectations today. Getting an engine rebuilt is mostly no longer a thing. The US mostly caught up, then Europe.
That depends on the car brand. Mercedes' don't require engine rebuilds because the engines outlast the body they are in. Most cheaper brands don't require engine rebuilds because it isn't economical to do so, by the time the car clocks over 250K its book value is way higher than an engine rebuild.
But for classic sports cars they're fairly normal, those engines were not made to last forever, tend to be fairly high power for their displacement and the book value of the cars is high enough that rebuilding an engine can make sense.
