If the difference was that stark aren't there old timers talking about how the old whale oil stuff was so good and why don't people find gallons of it saved here and there the same way you find lead paint or R12 refrigerant? Why isn't there some body of tribal knowledge saying that transmissions sucked in the 70s like we have for engines?
I don't doubt for a minute that the government would ham-fistedly ban something without a viable alternative and that the textbook engineer types would crunch numbers on the replacement and conclude that "it'll be fine with no changes to our hardware, run it" leading to a higher failure rate, but 8x failure (or even 5x failure rate, to account for increased number of automatic transmissions out there) rate? That's absurd.
I'd love to read the source for the claim but it's a paper version of a trade publication...