They screwed up their receivers circuit board from 2009 to 2015 ish. All their receivers would fail after 5 years and Onkyo did a massive recall campaign to replace the main circuit board (with all the amps attached.) That must have costed them.
The Wikipedia article is wrong - it only talks about "the capacitor plague" of water-based elcos from 1999 onwards.
There have been multiple capacitor plagues. E.g. in the late 80s/early 90s SMD electrolytics entered the market and these had absolutely atrocious reliability because their lead seals kept failing, so they'd empty their electrolyte into the PCB. Before that the Japanese brands had a plague. Philips "blue axials" had a plague in the 70s/80s. I don't remember the brand right now (small, red-cased caps), which also had a plague in the 80s. Rifa MP safety caps have had moisture ingress issues and associated explosion and fire issues since forever.
Uh, I have a TX-8020 from around that time. Nothing fancy, and I don't use it too much as it's not in my main setup. So far it has developed only one quirk: the power button doesn't work properly, you have to press it several times or in a certain spot for it to react, and sometimes, when you want to turn it off it instead says "tone mode: direct" in the display, as if I had pressed another button. Still not sure if this is a mechanical or circuit board problem.
