I recently upgraded to a 4K player, a Sony UPB-x800M2, and wow! Disks that played poorly, glitches, stops, skips, etc are now perfect. My Samsung Blu-Ray player was always somewhat glitchy and my old Sony DVD player was a backup for DVDs that would not play on my Samsung (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Crown) and even that wasn't a complete solution.

Players don't last forever but do die a slow agonizing death. You get used to it, and just live with it, blaming it on scratches a bad print, or just bad luck of the moment.

It all depends on how well made the players are and how you take care of them. My Oppo 4k player is nearing 8 years and still working well. I have a regular Oppo Blu-Ray player that's over 12 years old now and doesn't get used much, but it has worked fine whenever I do use it. (Some discs have had authoring issues that the newer player doesn't like, and vice versa.) I think the oldest DVD player I still use is a Pioneer which was hacked to ignore any button lockouts, it's 18 years old now. Had an issue with it freezing up on some discs but I wiped WD-40 on the rail the laser rides on and that seems to have fixed it. I've had two cheap ($35-range) DVD players in the past which I used for playing PAL discs on my old CRT, both of those died after just a couple years.

Absolute oldest working piece of video equipment I have is a Quasar Great Time Machine VCR made in 1977.

Anything which does a lot of disc burning, seems to have a short lifetime. (Such as dvd recorders or even computer dvd-r/bluray-r drives).

Wow! I have taken covers off and blown dust. Anything more than that is beyond my skill level. Got a picture?