Maybe I'm just showing my age (OK, downhill side of 50), but it seems to me that just about any whitegoods type of appliance these days is made to such shoddy standards, it would be pretty much impossible to attribute failure to vandalism on anyone's part.
They're that much cheaper and better at what they do that they're still better value for money, even if they have a quarter the lifespan. However, they don't have worse lifespans - you're looking back with rose tinted spectacles.
Repairing any kind of white good costs manpower, and is now almost always not worth it if it is anything more than a simple repair. Manpower used to be much cheaper, and white goods used to be much more expensive, so repairing them used to be economically viable.
It's not that they've got less reliable, it's that the cost of repairing stuff has gone up, and the cost of new stuff has gone down. It's no wonder more get scrapped quicker when this happens.