Both observations have equal validity for middle-/upper-class denizens whom can spend money on increasing entropy much faster. Go to anywhere remote and/or poor, and the better-to-do outsiders will be gobsmacked by inventiveness that, to the local, will seem mundane and vital. For example, one of my great-grandfathers made a continously self-cleaning oil-filter for farm equipment... the sort of thing corporations clearly wouldn’t offer for monetized consumables reasons.
Ah, so the sisal rope is just a simple filter, and not a "continuously self-cleaning" filter? I presume it's eventually fouled and must be disgarded? So this must not have been to which the ancestor was originally referring.
