> I heard an add for a car a few days ago on NPR that was literally just "it has 30+ inches of screens!" But perhaps the story is more about consumers who just want new, exciting things like weird door handles and 30 inches of screens

Be careful not to confuse what consumers want with what marketers try to make customers care about. Nobody cares about screen footage, but the ads will still push that as something that their car has over others or because they want to shift how consumers view the product. Convincing customers that a cheaper/worse design is actually a feature they should find desirable is an age old trick, so ads aren't a good indicator for what consumers want, at least not until they become successful enough that consumers start blindly requesting what the ads have trained them to look for. Then you get an "it's got electrolytes" situation.