It honestly isn’t. Chromebooks are very shoddily built. I have seen tons of them fail long before the end of the support window. Disposable cameras are a much more apt comparison than you realized.
They aren't all that bad. I have one Dell 730-8301 I bought in early 2014, and four Dell 3120 (built 2015), all still humming along no problem. They're running as servers now but for many years they saw conventional laptop duty.
The Acers of that era were pure trash, however.
Especially when you grow up poor.