Now I have one of the new Touch Bar MacBooks (with no escape key). I've had to send it in for repairs twice in one year because it keeps bricking itself. What's going on? Do I just have a defective computer or is part of a broader trend?
There are defective production runs all the time, in all manufacturers.
There are also some issues with design - e.g. for the last 3 years before 2019 Mac laptops had those crappy butterfly keyboards. If an issue is widespread, there's also a recall program.
But there are no issues of the kind "machines keep bricking themselves" that can be a "broad trend" in general (as in "it's not a production run issue that affected a number of units, Apple just keeps churning machines that brick themselves across production runs".
It's just isolated incidents magnified by the media (where also Apple complains sell more than complains about some Dell or Asus machine, that might or might not sell 100K-200K units).
Case in point, you say: "I've been using MacBooks of various models for close to 10 years and have never experienced even so much as a hardware hiccup. The machines were perfect for lack of a better word".
And yet, if you read the press those 10 years, people/media complained for all kinds of issues for those machines too - and indeed some people had them. But they were a small minority of the 50-100 million people who got Macs in those 10 years.