Top loaders break down to 2 distinct types - The top loader with horizontal drum and a door that opens in the side of the drum, and the top loader with vertical drum and sometimes some mixing wing in the center

The former are what used to be common in here (and i guess in Europe) - We still have one thats working well since the early 90s, and family have one from the late 80s (which is past some big repairs done by me over the last few years, but worked perfectly up to that point and works now after the repair)

The obvious advantages of top loaders of this type :

1. The drum is held by 2 bearings, so there is no torque on them in the direction that tends to rip the bearing sideways, like in the front loaders or top loaders of the vertical drum type

2. The door is never submerged, so its sealing tightness is not critical to prevent water from leaking out of the machine

The obvious advantages of top loaders of this type :

1. The drum is held by 2 bearings, so there is no torque on them in the direction that tends to rip the bearing sideways, like in the front loaders or top loaders of the vertical drum type

2. The door is never submerged, so its sealing tightness is not critical to prevent water from leaking out of the machine

Ad 1. There is higher loading of the bearings, but as long as the bearing assembly is properly designed and sized, there is no reason for that to be any problem. And recalling all the failures I've ever heard of, the bearing never gave on its own, but always as a result of water ingress (due to the seal ring going bad over time, often even combined with an overfill fault or the use of too foaming detergent).
And with the water ingress the toploaders have a clear disadvantage: Two seals, where ailure of any of them causing the water ingress problem, resulting into bearing damage too (there the loading does not matter - once water gets in, any bearing goeas bad very quick even when 100x oversized).

Ad 2. Indeed, intuition may suggest it could be a weak point, but the fact is, Ive never heard of any failure of that seal yet (except when someone leaves someclothing jammed in, but that is more of a sensitivity to user error than machine reliability problem).
Truth is, when the drain pump fails (the drain gets clogged by something falling off from some loundry), the top loader allows access into thefull tubto drain it with a hose without spilling thatmuch around compare to when messing up with a side loader full of water and clogged drain.

Our front loading machine, which has done no less than 20 years of service, has only ever leaked once, and that was a couple of months or so ago when for some reason the seal hadn't seated properly on closing the door. As soon as we noticed it, which was virtually straight away after it started filling, we switched off, drained it and opened/closed the door. Restarted and it worked perfectly.

Have a pair of old Admiral brand washer and dryer. Dryer is the typical front load drum and the lint trap is located on the top near the right edge. The washer is a standard top loader with agitator in the center of the drum. Both machines have their controls on the top near the back. They are mechanical controls not a circuit board in site.

The washers motor is starting to fail as it struggles to engage in order to spin during the rinse cycle and it also doesn't spin as fast during this cycle. And the motors brakes have failed so if you open the lid while it was spinning it takes forever to stop spinning. but other than that still works enough to wash the clothes while we look into its replacement.

I've just remembered one problem which I have seen affecting mainlz top loader washes and not the front loaders:
Because of the control placement, in top loaders with the controller on the back the controller is often exposed to water. It is just one seal in a washer box construction seam, which when goes bad, the water dripping from the wet door just drips onto the controller (regardless if it is mechanical cam-switch or electronic computer board, the mechanical just takes longer to fail in that condition). In front loaders the controls are on the most top corner, so completely out of reach for any water dripping of anything normally wet (door, detergent boxes,...; of course when you hose the machine down with water it will get in). My parents use top loader and all they had suffered from this problem. The mechanical ones (from late 80's, used till about 2005) had bad contacts, which oxidized and then in case the ones controlling the heater overheat and melt the cam mechanism; the newer electronic had computer to stop working, fortunately it was never any destructive fault yet, just getting confused of crazy signals and entering an error code. Drying it out solver the problem, plus when you keep rag underneath the door base, the water does not get in that fast, so it is still in use. But have seen boards from multiple other brands of top loaders completely burned down, with clear electrolytic and surface breakdown damage patterns (= water damage).

The controller on my machine is at the far right just out of reach of the door and water droplets. I've done maintenance on the controller in the past making sure the contacts were clean etc. No sign of water. They made a good machine, its gotta be 40 years old at this point

That's not bad at all, we thought ours at 20 years was good going..!

In the top loaders we have in our family's homes -

1980s Thomson Brandt - The controls are at the far back, on a raised panel that is higher than the door

Early 1990s Constructa - The controls are at the front, but have a raised block that is level with the top surface of the door. If the door would leak, the water would escape over the sides and not get to the controls