Honestly, I just read a breakdown from some mechanic who said the same thing. He claimed he'd checked like fifty of them and only saw a problem on maybe two, so it sounds like yours is a solid sample size. Tbh, I think a lot of these online horror stories get blown way out of proportion by people who had one bad experience. Ngl, it makes me wonder if the issue is more about how people maintain them than a design flaw. But hey, I'm no expert, just repeating what I saw.

Honestly, I once put a telemarketer on hold and just walked away for good.

My brother kept all his floppy disks in a shoebox under his bed. One summer the basement flooded. Water got in the box. No labels left. Every single disk looked the same. He tried to read them one by one and it was just random gibberish from different games. Never knew if he lost anything important.

That 10 minutes with a multimeter still beats the hour or more you waste when you swap the wrong board and gotta put it all back together. I'd rather gamble on a bad part than spend all that time chasing ghosts when 90% of the time it's the board anyway.

20 pages rule changed my life, honestly.