It makes a huge difference financially if one can do their own maintenance vs relying on shops or dealers to do it. Shop rates are very high and given the industry’s shady reputation, I can see how some people wait until things break instead of being proactive. It’s hard for them to tell if they are being lied to or not.
BITOG crowd has a very skewed perspective. We are enthusiasts and even if we don’t perform the work ourselves, we can usually tell if something needs to be done or not. An average person relies on the technician, service writer or their Indy mechanic to tell them what needs to be done. Unfortunately many in the industry use the customers lack of knowledge to either up-sell unneeded service or down right rip them off.
These kind of stories spread quite rapidly, especially these days and leave a long lasting and negative impression.