>moving parts will fail more often than solid state things.

And when the solid state things fail they are probably more expensive to replace.

I too have replaced instrument clusters (in a Ford) that failed due to age. Two things failed - a couple of capacitors that allow the unit to process the velocity information it gets from the VSS that tells the cluster how fast the vehicle is moving, and the LCD display (liquid crystal) that tracks the accumulated mileage. Both were >25 years old and I fixed the problem by buying a used gauge cluster from a similar vehicle at a wrecking yard. The mileage on the two vehicles was vastly different (300k miles on mine versus only 120k on the donor) and the vehicle age was the same.

On a different vehicle (Nissan) we had a gauge cluster issue where the instrument lights would fail at night or would be ON/OFF randomly as you drove. My wife took the vehicle to the dealership and had them diagnose the issue. $1500 to replace the malfunctioning gauge cluster was their verdict.

Fortunately she did not let them do anything to the vehicle and instead decided to just drive it like it was. For a long time we used a small flashlight to illuminate the dash as we drove at night. I bought a replacement for it from a wrecking yard but didn't install it since I wanted to use it as a known-good example in determining the problem with the original cluster.

Eventually I found some free time and decided to investigate the issue since it seemed like it could be something simple, like a broken trace on the circuit board. I removed a clip-in piece of trim and the six screws holding it in the dash and unplugged the three connectors.

I was intending to use the oven and do a solder reflow but before I got started on that I used my loupe and walked every trace on the board, they were nice and fat and easy to follow. There were no issues anywhere that I could find. It didn't feel like it needed a reflow. I had removed all the bulbs that are used to light the gauges and idiot lights so that I could follow the traces and as I picked them up to begin putting them back in place I noticed that some of them had carbon flashing inside the bulb.

With that information, I carefully separated the ones with the carbon flashing from those without and examined each separately. All of the ones with the carbon had filaments that could be seen to be broken, disconnected etc so those bulbs were effectively burnt out. Turns out that they were in the critical locations used to illuminate the speedometer, tachometer, and oil, fuel, battery, and coolant lights. Those that were still good were down in the group of lights that illuminated only at startup or rarely when there was an issue.

Each bulb, there were half a dozen of them, cost $2 at the dealership. I did some investigating and found that we were not the only ones to have this identical problem and that quite a few people had been suckered into replacing the cluster which cost $520 brand new from the dealership. I guess the rest of our quote was labor to remove the old one and install the new one. Seems excessive to me but maybe some people are okay with paying that kind of money for someone to spend less than 30 minutes removing the cluster, replacing a few bulbs, and reinstalling the cluster.

I found some LED replacement bulbs online and used some of the money that I saved investigating the issue to replace all the bulbs in the gauge cluster and haven't had a problem since. That is more than 10 years ago and the vehicle currently is a daily driver with 265k miles on it.

Personally, I will not be buying anything that requires me to use a touch screen to control it. I guarantee that the dealerships will be no help at all in diagnosing issues with them and will happily roll in the cash they can generate replacing things that shouldn't exist to begin with.