In what context are people saying this? I’ve never heard anyone proclaim that electronic devices are more reliable than mechanical devices. See for example how people desire cars with “no computers”.
Anyone that has had to deal with a carbureted engine, or old school hydraulic ‘computer’ based automatic transmission is never going to extol their reliability or ease of repair.
Those also are doing 1/10th of the work (for things like automatic engine tuning, wear adjustment, on the fly power band adjustment, altitude adjustment, anti-pollution adjustment, etc).
The reason why people complain about modern cars is because computers have made it exceptionally easy to add massive amounts of new (and poorly tested, in many cases) functionality.
And even the equivalent of DRM.
If if you used current tech to implement the old feature set, and spent even a little effort making it open instead of DRM-ish, it could be even simpler and more reliable. But no one is doing that. Because it’s more profitable using it ‘for evil’, as it were.
The problem is not that modern cars are somehow less reliable than old cars. They are much more reliable. But they’re also much less repairable without specialized equipment. You can with somewhat accessible technology repair almost all defects on a purely mechanical car. You cannot do the same for a modern car unless you happen to have a chip fab.
