alt Hacker NewsA comparable town in the US would absolutely have a local or franchise repair business doing those things. What neither of them will have in abundance are shops replacing BGA modules as an upgrade. For that it'd be major cities only.
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Replacing components like a phone screen, yeah - but not the kind of thing the OP is talking about. More like replacing a worn USB-C port on a random motherboard using a soldering iron, hot air station, and microscope, or tracking down an unknown failed component on a circuit board, or swapping a random surface-mount Motorola chip in the ECU of your early-2000s car. Sometimes there’s a whole market square where every shop specializes in one of these things.
And it's not that expensive.
I don’t think that is true. Ubiquitous access to free or low cost education is what makes this possible, and I certainly don’t see those kinds of businesses in towns of 50-100k people in the USA. There are people that are capable of that kind of work, of course, but they are employed by x corp or do contract work, and they are not competing with the cost of replacement consumers devices, since their rates would have to be > 150 an hour to stay in business.
At least in Australia, anything outside common phone repairs goes in to the "not worth it" basket. I had a USB-C port snap of a microphone, PCB pads were still fine, just needs someone to use a hot air gun to attach a new port. Repair stores didn't want to touch it.
And I can see the logic. Wages are so high that anything that they can't exactly know the repair time and success rate can easily exceed the device value. While in lower income countries they can afford to mess around for quite a while on repairs since the replacement cost is relatively massive.