Hi bakunin...

Oh boy, I reckon I am gonna love this thread. ;oD
And I thought I was alone. Now you have set me off. I agree with everything you have written.
(Apologies for any typos.)

I have been into electronics all my life until retirement, getting my degree as a student apprentice from Marconi Radar Systems from 1968 - 76.
Went through life changes to eventually become a major shareholder in a company that designed, installed, repaired and maintained medium to high power RF equipment, transmitters, receivers and associated gear from around 1 Watt to several KiloWatts, 1980 - 2015, when I retired.

Oh those days of valve/tubes when you could see the components, and fondle them with such affection. Repairs and maintenance were difficult but very easy.
Then came the transistorised stuff and the units sizes collapsed considerably. You could still feel those components but their sizes had also collapsed. Repairs and maintenance were also difficult and easy.

Now we hit the DIP 7400 and 4000 series ICs and still that air of component size but the units are an order of magnitude more complex and require a database as to what these DIPs do, so I was forced to understand pure logic and be able to design stuff around them. Repairs and maintenance were much the same as the transistorised stuff.

Oh boy, we now hit surface mount microprocessors and peripheral ICs but still with standard type passive components. These things are an order of magnitude more complex too. Oh dear, we can't reliably replace faulty chips manually the old way, we need a proper workstation. So several grand UK pounds later we are now able to do repairs and maintenance.

Surface mount. UGH! This has evolved into anything but repairable, at first you could at least see the passives but these reduced in size by orders of 2 magnitude without degrading reliability until they just looked like tiny pieces for grit, forget about repairs and maintenance, just pull the board and chuck.

And finally everything in the super-surface mount IC itself. Scrap if it has failed and get a new unit complete, the IC[s] can't be removed by our now ancient workstation and there is no means of tracing a fault inside a black slab containing near unlimited components.

And everything is for the better.

There is much more but I want to read others rants too... ;oD