A lot of people seem to have forgotten that many 2012 retina MacBooks had bad screens. Mine did. Mine also had problems with USB or the bus it's on cutting out, causing the internal keyboard to stop working. Most of my internals were replaced for that one and it still happens occasionally. Overall it's still a good computer which is why I continue to use it.

Apple has had quality issues for much longer than most people realize. It keeps getting worse.

I worked for an Apple repair shop from 2008ish to 2014ish.

The mid 2012 laptop I bought new went through two separate optical drives before I stopped using the drive altogether and put in another hard drive. The laptop also had two bad logicboards from NVidias recall iirc. One board died a month after getting it new, and the other died almost 3 years later.

To this day it is still going strong. I am starting to run into some video ram type issues (I think). I get random lines on any screen (external / internal) and a full reboot "fixes" it. I don't want to replace it, but after all the Apple changes (iOS devices vs "Pro" devices mainly), I just don't think any of their laptops fit my needs for a device anymore.

Like you said though, Apple has always had some hardware type issues like this. I remember HP, Dell and Lenovo all having big issues like that too when I was on the bench.

My 2012 MBP is still pretty great, but newer MacOS releases have put a strain on reliability, for me at least: When plugging in an external display while it's asleep, there's a significant chance it won't wake up without a forced restart.

"Your computer restarted because of a problem", and subsequently having 20 apps open up on login is the bane of my existence on MacOS. Same issue with my work touchbar MBP.