Don't doubt you a single bit. The house my parents live in has a oven-over-stovetop range made in 1959, top of the line. It's still working perfectly. The deep freezer they bought when they got married in the 70s? Still working. Their green hand-me-down fridge from 1972? Still working. The hand-me-down vacuum cleaner from 1951? Yep still working. The hand-me-down fridge from 1934? Sucker is still chugging along too.
On the other hand(snowbirding time), the heat pump at my parents place in FL had to be replaced 5 years ago, it was 8 years old. The heat pump at my place in FL was replaced in warranty 8 months old. Bought a new fridge last year and it was replaced fully in warranty after 3mo, the second one 5 months. In both cases the refrigerant leaked out.
That's not really hard. If you only require a processor to do specific things(like ASIC) it's always very fast, you don't need all the "extra junk" like physics, media rendering, extra CPU states, 'fast path' calculations for 2d geometry that modern CPU's require. See all the direct path extensions that a CPU has today, SSE+(fast vector calculations), MMX(6+ versions for fast integer calculations), x86-64(handles all 32bit programing in a 64bit programing environment), virtualization, AES(onboard encryption), AVX(advanced vector calculations), FMA(fast floating-point calculations).
Also, modern computers don't require every calculation to be error checked, memory for short-storage doesn't have to be self-correcting, or require valid checksums from the CPU either. "Near enough is good enough," because it's not mission critical.
GM used to build pretty much everything. Train engines, computer systems, integrated control systems for military vehicles, military vehicles(from light to heavy), control systems for pretty much anything you can think of.
Most of rural Canada(I live in cow country in southwestern ontario), and the prairies(Alberta/Saskatchewan/Manitoba) is very much like the US. We're an independent lot, we don't like big government, we don't like high taxes, we want to keep our money that we earn. If we want to go grab a varmint rifle, a pistol or even a high powered rifle and go plink vermin or cans on our own property, we should have that right.
When shit hits the fan, we don't huddle up and wait for the government to save us. We're out there helping our neighbors. When blizzards shutdown highways and county roads, the police call on us to break out our snowmobiles to rescue people from cars. If crops are still sitting in a field, everyone gets together with their own equipment and helps out, expecting the same in return. When a tornado flattens a farm and 400 head of cattle are killed, money, equipment, barn raisings, and new animals get donated.
Fun fact, upper and lower canada tried it's own revolution in 1810 from the brits, and were sold out by crown loyalists(who were American) living in the US who sold the information to the brits. Everyone from gun runners, to people forming underground militias and so-on. It was so bad that the "family compact" who effectively ran upper and lower, threw anyone they thought was related into prisons or executed them out right. Which fanned the flames more.
That actually led to the crown stepping in and giving 'nominal rights' to people which smothered the entire thing. Canada is a lesson Americans could learn from, where if the overlord grants something instead of you fighting for it, most people will be happy with the quick and easy path to a solution.
This type of stuff is happening in the wine world too. Some people might have heard about rare wines/liquors being stolen. That's because it's as you pointed out, a very easy exchange medium and unlike say art, it's much harder to trace. It doesn't help either that rare vintages have been used as collateral for decades either and it can be insured too.
Problem is gab engages in censorship.