Transistor failure can happen, it just kinda doesn't anymore. It's mostly a thing people worry about with classic cars, because even bad old transistors have about a 20-30 year lifespan.

After CAN bus was introduced and standardized in the early 90s, usually the actual problem associated with "electrical gremlins" were either model-specific poor CAN implementations and then the capacitor plague which affected mostly cars from MY 1999-2008. Overall, cars made after about 2009 typically have fairly reliable solid state electronics.

I'm confident Wmill did mean the transmission because 17,000 mi or km seems very low but possible for an abused or poorly manufactured transmission to fail, even though that's typically a fluke rather than universal to any model of vehicle. A truck or car transmission should ideally last about 20x that long, and they usually have a 60,000-100,000 mile warranty.