I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken.

It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.

That's a false dichotomy; there are plenty of keyboards that don't require recalls due to issues like the butterfly ones but also don't have the issues you're describing.