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Got a bunch of replacement parts from Lego today and decided to do some tests with the broken ones.
It seems like none of the rampant cracking issues are in any way the result of hamhandling your sets and are definitely caused from the parts themselves, be it the stress of staying connected, issues with certain colors or something entirely else.
The upper left part is one of those flag pieces and the thin cracks are the ones that developed over time while the thick ones were deliberately done by me by prying the unbroken half of the clip apart with my fingers.
As you can see they look vastly different and I've yet to see an example where the cracks looked like the purposely done ones.
The nougat-brown brick with clip, well, is a brown brick with clip which crumble when you just look at them - just a tiny bit of force and it broke.
Now the bottom ones are pretty much the same pieces (although the flag here is a triangular one, not the square one) but in a different color and I simply couldn't manage to crack the unbroken half of the clip like with the other two no matter how hard I tried and I also noticed that unlike the other two those cracks weren't clean cuts but slightly rough with the clip still being partially connected by small strings of plastic.
In terms of age, top left is from 2017's Ninjago Water Strider, top right from 2014's GotG Milano, bottom left 2016's King's Mech and bottom right from 2017's Ayesha's Revenge.
