totally agree, I just mention it cause a lot of people put a lot more worth on it then they should. ime shops that advertise being authorized are more scummy then the average 3rd party repair shop.

idk, I’ve fixed a lot of phones that people take into baths or showers. constant exposure will wear down the seals and there’s a reason they’re water resistant not waterproof. plus if you’ve ever had any repair done even by an authorized provider that water resistance goes out the window.

dead ram definitely still happens, yes, but it’s exceedingly rare. I fix hundreds of PCs a year, and I maybe get one or two a year where the root cause is actually bad ram. more often it’s configuration issues or hardware implementation issues, for example the gigabyte x870 boards really don’t like XMP for some reason.

ecc doesn’t really have anything to do with whether a ram stick fails or not, it can help with misbehaving sticks but if a stick is dead it’s dead and ecc can’t help a dead region.

smartctl would be what your looking for even for ssds (although ssds fail quick enough that if smartctl catches something there’s a chance it’s already too late, smartd allows for scheduled tests and I’ve definitely saved data off of ssds because I had daily smart tests running that caught early failure).

I however strongly disagree with the hardware issue. there is no indication that this is hardware (honestly hardware accounts for VERY few issues like this, and RAM failing still happens but is 98% a thing of the past). diagnosing without any logs is a bit of a lost cause, we simply don’t have enough info, hopefully OP updates the post with the output of journalctl from the last boot.