Cool find, op!
The reason our grandparents generation was good at fixing things is because they had to be. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and worked difficult manual labor jobs. Contrary to the Reddit memes about how past generations lived like kings on trivial jobs, they worked extremely hard for everything and made it last.
It’s really easy to get service manuals and do basic maintenance on simple things like faucets these days. I think the only reason it’s becoming common for people to not know how to do basic repairs or even find basic service information is that many people grew up never having to think about it. I still have adult friends who went from living with their parents to dorms to rented apartments who never learned the first thing about maintaining or fixing things around the house because they’ve never had to and they don’t want to - and they can keep going that way without really losing anything. It’s a choice at this point, but it works for them.
My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.
The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.
The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.
Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.
It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.
It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.
The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.
I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.
I looked at Delta’s website and sure enough you can even download CAD models and drawings of their faucets: https://www.deltafaucet.com/bim-library
Incidentally, the newer variants also have flow restrictors, which aren't hard to remove.
Funny, that exact model dominates the shelf space at the Lowe's near me. Practically a whole bay for just those, over 50 in stock right now.
Its the eigenvalue of taps. It's hot, or it's not, and which orifice it's coming out of is completely unclear as well as which motion causes more, or less of water and heat.
It sems these days shower valves have all been enshittified to have exactly one dimension, which proceeds from "off" to "small trickle of cold water", then "slow flow of warm water", and finally "slow flow of barely hot water".
Ultimately we replaced the whole faucet and fixture, but that single reply probably made me a customer for life.
I find foul language to be the most effective tool for this job.
Works great. Amazing how durable the faucet is!