Your statements suggest that we assign fault/root cause to the consumer.

Wrong. I’m saying they’re both at fault. Thus, the false dichotomy.

How can we reasonably expect consumers to perform comprehensive research studies on everything they purchase?

We don’t. A small amount of due diligence before they spend thousands on a product is all that is required. It’s not like they’re going to overlook the anti-consumerism that Apple is infamous for.

Besides, in this specific case, it turned out to be a catastrophic latent failure.

It doesn’t matter what type of failure it is. The problem is that they often cannot be repaired, and that is intentional user-hostile design.