The $25k car is going extinct?

I work on my own cars now (as a hobby really) and one of the reasons the new cars are so expensive is they are much more complicated. A lot of this seems to be over-engineering IMO. This is alluded to in the article, but not explicitly stated.

The cars I work on are from the early 90s and everything is very simple to understand.

e.g. Electronics are normally simple circuits that aren't much more complicated than what you would find in a door bell and finding faults is normally just tracing wires and using a multi-meter. I had issues with the brake lights / reverse lights not working, the issue turned out that the spade like connector in the fuse box was pushed through and was making partial contact. Price to fix this was £0.

EDIT: Just remembered this isn't accurate. I had to buy a new reverse light. The entire reverse light assembly was ~£20. So the price to fix was about £20. The light assembly itself was like a big bicycle light.

My newer car needs a OB-II scanner to diagnose anything with a phone app. While this is arguably quicker it can be misleading. Sometimes it will be telling you that something is malfunctioning but it is really the sensor itself. These sensors are £200-£300 a piece. Replacing 4 glow plug sensors cost me £800. I was paying essentially to make the "you must service your engine" light to go away. There was nothing wrong with engine itself.

Any recommendation how to start learning repairing a car? I have absolutely zero experience. A friend of mine said just learn to change a tyre first and I have been procrastinating since.

The reality is that learning how to repair modern cars yourself without the help of someone experienced is a great way to get yourself killed.

You might not know about Harbor Freight jackstands being far overrated and thus kill yourself by assuming that they will hold their rated load.

You almost certainly cannot find more than some youtube videos about how to do things on your post 2015 vehicle. Haines and other repair manual companies don't exist or on life support and haven't made a new guide since 2020 at the latest.

The average entry level talent, i.e. the folks at Jiffy Lube/Vavoline, are often doing things so wrong that it'd be better to never try to "learn" in an environment where they will impact and strip your oil plug, up-sell grandmas with fake dirty filters and "blinker fluid" stories, etc.

If you don't have an actual experienced mechanic to learn from (i.e. someone who can strip and put back together an engine and it runs perfectly) - don't even bother! I'm not joking and I'm exactly like you in that I want to learn to work on cars! But I've learned that the tactics that allow you to get to making 300K a year in tech without much of being taught by other people do NOT work with cars. You WILL need to socialize with a master mechanic. There's no other way.

oh btw - most of the stuff like oil and car related gunk that will touch you when you work on cars is TOXIC AS HELL. Same with what you will breathe (most people don't mask when they should in a garage and they often don't ventilate too).