The one huge important thing about repairing things yourself is the same huge important thing about maximally empowering individuals to conduct their own lives as they see fit: anyone that isn’t YOURSELF can’t respond to your needs remotely as fast as you can, and the consequences of not taking care of it yourself immediately can sometimes be catastrophic.
“When seconds count, police are only minutes away” comes to mind. A huge farm machine breaking down right before a harvest is another. In these cases, if you can’t handle it yourself or hire someone nearby who knows how to handle it and you have to wait on the lumbering bureaucracy, you end up with an irreversible catastrophe (battery/assault/death or a ruined million-dollar harvest) while waiting on the “authoritative responder” to show up.
Obviously, these are some of the worst cases, but this applies even to less severe things. If none of the plumbing in your house will drain properly and you’re willing to look up how to unclog a drain, buy a plumbing snake, and get your hands a little dirty, you can clear the pipes yourself in a couple of hours and take a satisfying poop afterwards to celebrate being able to flush again. Your other options are to wait a few days or more for a plumber to show up and do it for you OR to desperately look for an emergency plumber, pay a huge premium for immediate service, and still wait for them to show up and fix it. Some people might opt for the plumber, some might not.
Now imagine that all the drains in the house have locks on them and you aren’t allowed to snake your own drain even if you know how to and want to do it…and then, just to make it ten times worse, you can’t hire the fastest plumber or the best plumber that can respond quickly–you have no choice but to call the drain manufacturer and wait for a Massive Dump Tunnel Inc. authorized poop tube technician to come out a month later at a premium monopoly expense.
I hope you have great income and some mad poop retention skills, because you’re gonna be a sad, constipated panda.
Most people in our society can barely change tires on their cars, let alone repair plumbing on their own end, change a battery on their computer laptop and so forth.
Few people are truly self sufficient, which is the sad thing. They’d rather have a car mechanic look at their car for the problems, instead of learning about them on their own.