Ok so my original point was too narrow. It's not western capitalists, it's all of them

Important to note, it's not China's fault for the low quality. It's just yet another developing country being used for sweatshops by western capital. "The Chinese" didn't make it bad, western capitalists made it bad but in China

We could also just mine more gold (not infinitely I know but more than we have). And given the state of the economy where 97% of the money is fake, what's to stop the rich from just digitizing gold too? We wouldnt need to physically get more gold just like we don't need to physically print more money for there to be more of it

Good thing the Netherlands isn't socialist

Unfortunately in our current economic system, successful firms aren't formed based on good ideas, but on profitable ones. Firms have found that as a whole it's more profitable to sell low quality products more frequently, so that's what we get to deal with

I don't think the answer has to be either planned obsolescence or consumer ease, but both. Companies make two categories of products (for the sake of argument) cheap and fragile, and good quality and durable. The worse product is cheaper, the latter more expensive. The consumer, seeing so much false variety in their products, gets overwhelmed and just tries to save money, which leads then to just buying the cheaper one. This "Coincidentally" makes the company more money because the consumer buys more fridges over their life for less money.