Worth saving
I recognize the friends, but will do a little background reading on Fred Maytag.
There's some good and bad in the big fish swallowing the smaller fish - but more cars today look more alike, as do the appliances. That speaks something.
Somewhere in my reading, I read of several complaints with the Neptunes.
But you make a good point, and like many of the other decades of appliances designed, if not for you and others, they would eventually become scarce, vanished next to a rock or weeds in one of the prairies or fields.