Because of that drama, I remember some people (maybe me included, not sure anymore) actually thinking that electrolytic caps just generally had a pretty bad lifetime, and the need for replacement was just reality for products that were expected to last for more than an unreasonably short lifetime.
That's probably also the reason why so many retro enthusiasts just generally "re-cap" almost everything they touch. In a lot of cases, you just don't need to do that, and sometimes it could be worse to replace capacitors not affected by the capacitor plague: Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.
Only later did I learn that it actually seemed to have been industrial espionage gone wrong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
That's probably also the reason why so many retro enthusiasts just generally "re-cap" almost everything they touch. In a lot of cases, you just don't need to do that, and sometimes it could be worse to replace capacitors not affected by the capacitor plague: Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.