> lead free solder has been much more damaging for the environment because of all the e-waste it created.
We're getting quite off-topic here (I guess I should have used different examples), but I would be interested where you got that information from. Most consumer electronics devices do not break prematurely, and especially not due to soldering issues. Source: I buy most electronics second-hand, I regularly repair electronics RoHS and not RoHS, I use lead-free solder and occasionally leaded solder, I watch a bunch of Youtube videos by other people who repair a bunch of electronics, just for fun. (You'll always (and easily) find someone who knows more than me, and it's entirely possible that you do.)
Most consumer electronics devices are retired because their owners got something shinier, or if "broken", it's the battery, display, or some important connector. If something is "actually" broken, it's usually due to power ICs, capacitors, fuses. (You could of course argue that some broken connectors are a case of a soldering issue, but yeah, it's not like I haven't seen broken connectors that were actually soldered using leaded solder, so things can get kind of muddy there)
Back in the 00s, the transition to lead free solder was blamed for the high failure rate of BGA packages found in consoles and GPUs.
One of the theories at the time was that the poor thermal design of these devices (the most notable example being the Xbox 360) lead to cracks in the solder balls after repeated thermal cycling.
