There's one of these articles every few weeks. I'd argue that the response has been the "maker" movement, built around Arduino and Raspberry Pi. People also need to distinguish between "you have to tinker in order to use the thing" and "you can tinker if you need to". Old cars were more tinkerable and less reliable.
Reliability is a curve; a function of how much maintenance is spent on it.
No question at all that a modern car with zero maintenance will be more reliable than an old car was with zero maintenance. But with a surprisingly small amount of maintenance, an old can can be more reliable than a modern car with the same amount of maintenance. Sure, it'll take a while before one of them fails, but I can (and do) keep a thirty year old car running with maintenance that probably averages to about ten minutes a week. I suspect very strongly that if I spent ten minutes a week maintaining a modern car (which, from what I can tell, would be me looking at the lights on the dashboard to see if the car is asking for more water or oil), it would fail before the old car did.