Given that as soon as cloud computing happened we stopped bothering to debug VMs and just started deleting them and rebuilding, I don't know why people find the idea this applies to other industries surprising.
Repair involves establishing where in a very large state space an item is, and finding a path back to optimal.
Whereas building a new item simply involves traversing an already known path to optimal.
While in understand your reasoning it is a limited view perspective: The rebuild cost of a VM to society as a whole is marginal at best, an entire hvac system has a lot more crap it needs to dump somewhere when it is replaced.
Given that as soon as cloud computing happened we stopped bothering to debug VMs and just started deleting them and rebuilding, I don't know why people find the idea this applies to other industries surprising.
Repair involves establishing where in a very large state space an item is, and finding a path back to optimal.
Whereas building a new item simply involves traversing an already known path to optimal.