>Not sure why we stopped expecting that from electronics.

For TVs specifically, the technology changed a lot. For a long time, everyone was stuck on the NTSC standard, which didn't change much. At first, everyone had B&W TVs, so once you had one, there was no reason to change. Then color TV came out, so suddenly people wanted those. After that, again no reason to change for a long time. Later, they got remote controls, so sometimes people would want one of those, or maybe a bigger screen, but generally a working color TV was good enough. Because TVs were glass CRTs, bigger screens cost a lot more than smaller ones, and there wasn't much change in cost here for a long time.

Then HDTV came out and now people wanted those, first in 720p, and later in 1080i/p. And flat screens came too, so people wanted those too. So in a relatively short amount of time, people went from old-style NTSC CRTs to seeing rapid improvements in resolution (480p->720p->1080->4k), screen size (going from ~20" to 3x", 4x", 5x", 6x", now up to 85"), and also display/color quality (LCD, plasma, QLED, OLED), so there were valid reasons to upgrade. The media quality (I hate the word "content") changed too, with programs being shot in HD, and lately 4k/HDR, so the difference was quite noticeable to viewers.

Before long, the improvements are going to slow or stop. They already have 8k screens, but no one buys them because there's no media for them and they can't really see the difference from 4k. Even 1080p media looks great on a 4k screen with upscaling, and not that much different from 4k. The human eye is only capable of so much, so we're seeing diminishing returns.

So I predict that this rapid upgrade cycle might be slowing, and probably stopping before long with the coming economic crash and Great Depression of 2025. The main driver of new TV sales will be people's old TVs dying from component failure.