Most of our car engines run at a small fraction of their capability, even when going at highway speeds. Most servers have a 15-25% utilization to handle failover situations. If you have a beefy as fuck set up with extra wide tolerance margins, things can last for a very long time. Car engines with a chamber that’s essentially containing explosions still end up running for decades with very little maintenance. Well, some longer than others. This is also true for consumer electronics/appliances. You still have things going just fine from almost a century ago. Yes, some things fail faster than others and the designers were aware of limitations and trade offs, but most components continue working. What would be wise in this case is to look at how the voyager was designed for reliability to understand why it hasn’t completely gone off the rails. Meaning, what are the common anpproaches and why do they fail, and why doesn’t the voyager fail. What does it do that’s different than the usual method. Lots to be learned there but I don’t think the people were wizards, they probably dealt with very brittle things and had tight specs and knew how to design certain parts to very close to perfect. The manufacturing of parts plays a huge role in reliability. If you know you can achieve better manufacturing output but it is a matter of cost, then that’s easy - government can pay whatever. But if you don’t know, then that’s a harder situation to be in and that’s guess work. But if you have a capacitor that’s normally 20% off rating that you’d buy in a store, and you know you can get it to be down to 1% off or even less from rating, then you go for that with everything you’ve got. And all parts are made with as wide of tolerance as you can get so that as they degrade, things can still work. Easier said than done, but there it is. Things will eventually break and not work. But for now, Voyager has bought time, quite literally.