They have the right idea. Not saying they don't have problems.
I would have agreed with you in 1995. The ones I had from back then were rock solid and very well engineered. My dad, brother, and I went through a phase where BMW's and Merc's were about all we drove...Between all of us we had a 635CSi, a couple of E30 M3's, two E30 convertibles, a 735i, a 528e, an E28 M5, a couple of E classes, an E36 328i, an E34 535i...all great cars, reliable, easy to work on, and reasonable to maintain.
Somewhere in the last 20 years, German automotive engineers decided they were prescient enough to design things without actually testing them to validate their designs. My favorite example is how they all jumped onto the gasoline turbo direct injection bandwagon around 2007ish without actually running them long enough to understand how much the acceptable windows shrink for all sorts of operating parameters with those types of engines. Almost all of the early ones have to have the valves cleaned every 30k miles due to the lack of cleaning action by the fuel mist washing over them that they would get in a port injection engine. They also invented a thing unique to those types of engines called Low Speed Preignition that still isn't that well understood...but somewhere along the lines in an effort to cut down on it they asked the motor oil manufacturers to modify their additive packages to reduce the amount of oil mist that circulated back to the combustion chamber through the PCV system. But in the mean time the knock sensors are so sensitive to pick it up that they pick up other nuisance things like a timing chain that isn't brand new and occasionally taps on the guides or the tensioner (which are plastic and have to be replaced periodically, combining the worst features of the timing chain with the same of the timing belt). I had a German engineered (BMW) Mini Cooper S that had some of these problems, as well as a number of others where at 100k miles I was replacing parts with date stamps that were already several years newer than the car. And these were parts that should have been simple and on many cars outlast the vehicle itself...parts like thermostat housings and vacuum pumps, overcomplicated and undervalidated so they last 50k miles and cost $250.
An example that many of us here are familiar with is when Daimler got hold of Chrysler and in 2005 replaced a perfectly good OPDA on the Jeep 4.0 with a different one that had an inadequately lubricated bushing that fails and takes out the camshaft anywhere from 20k miles and up, and integrated the transmission controller with a PCM that's prone to failing when from 1997-2004 they had been just fine.
That's the end of my rant, but I at least deserve credit for bringing it back full circle to the complexities introduced during the run of the TJ.