> Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes.

You mean minutes to find the right bootleg manual site with PDF for an adjacent product category, then some more minutes to realize you cannot safely (if at all) get at the manual, some more minutes to find a different bootleg PDF site, realize that it's actually not close enough to the model you have, and 1h later, finally find the good enough PDF... only to realize that "service manuals" today are often useless, and decide to repeat this process on YouTube?

> I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone.

Overnight is often too long. Also good luck finding the right parts and reconciling conflicting IDs between manuals, manufacturers and vendors.

> Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.

Except when 90% of the faucets are uncommon, and support for them gets effectively discontinued after a few years.

Now contrast that with our grandparents, who usually had repair manuals included with the product, most parts were universal, and you could actually go to a local hardware store where the clerk would be able to figure out what parts you needed on the spot, and with luck had them in stock.

I'm not claiming our grandparents had it better in general, but let's also not pretend there are no downsides to ongoing specialization and market competition. We may have more stuff, prettier stuff, better stuff[0], but nothing is ever compatible with anything, it's that way on purpose, and people are no longer supposed to repair anything themselves.

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[0] - That's highly debatable in appliance space.

I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.

The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.

The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.

Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.

It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.

It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.