I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.
My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.
Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.
I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.
Yeah, they used way more oil than today, and they were more polluting, and they were less safe, and there were less rules (I can remember six of us kids piling into a VW Bug with my dad). But we're discussing affordability.
The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often? Meaning people could afford to replace them with new ones more often?
nobody was making that argument
cars weren't replaced more often; people drove the same car for longer than they do now, in part because they more easily repairable