Graceful degradation is a sub field of resilience engineering - designing systems for resilience. Resilience necessarily reduces efficiency. It was observed during Covid for example that our logistics systems were organised around efficiency as opposed to resilience.

Planned obsolescence, or its engineering term: design life, is also geared towards efficiency.

It’s important to note that neither is in itself a bad thing, we have to design around need. Spending effort on resilience only for the user to throw it away is a massive waste, for example.