There's a truism about this concerning how cars from the late 80's, early 90's, almost invariably drive/drove to the scrapyard under their own power, with some sort of repair (like some welding on the rear floor, etc) which was reckoned to cost more than the car was worth, as the reason for them being scrapped.
Realising this, I didn't bother servicing properly because I figured the engine would outlast the car anyway, and if not, then there were (and would increasingly be) plenty of donor vehicles with perfectly good engines waiting to be had for 100 quid complete. I had a hoist, and could swap the engine over a weekend for a low mileage, newer replacement.
Sure enough, the car managed 140,000 miles with an engine that started and drove perfectly well at the end of it, with a minimum of oil changes. The reason for getting shot of it was a ticking timebomb caused by a radiator leak which was causing some nasty rust issues all over the engine bay, but the engine was running as sweet as a nut, using almost no oil*, was silent at tickover, and still delivering the same 40 mpg as it had done from new.
I don't know about more modern cars with tougher emission rules to meet but you have to search hard to find cars which had worn out engines as the cause for their demise, unless the engine had some major issue like shipping with a dead oil pump or whatnot, or was just a pitiful design (like those BMW ones with the surface treatment that, well, that didn't work, basically.) Or, with something broken that should have been fixed, and wasn't.
Go back ten or twenty years earlier, though, and engines were actually wearing out before the car did.
(* the entire through-life use of oil - ignoring pre-20,000 miles and the one oil change it had at 97,000 miles - was six litres, more or less.)