I agree.
Given that as soon as cloud computing happened we stopped bothering to debug VMs and just started deleting them and rebuilding, I don't know why people find the idea this applies to other industries surprising.
Repair involves establishing where in a very large state space an item is, and finding a path back to optimal.
Whereas building a new item simply involves traversing an already known path to optimal.
While in understand your reasoning it is a limited view perspective: The rebuild cost of a VM to society as a whole is marginal at best, an entire hvac system has a lot more crap it needs to dump somewhere when it is replaced.