The idea behind durability being immersive is pretty simple. Items aren't indestructible. I can bash open a door, I can break a stick I use as a weapon, so on and so forth.
It's intuitive to ones understanding of the world and how things work.
It's immersive that such intuitive thoughts hold true. Going counter to them is being the opposite of immersive.
There's a degree of suspension of disbelief for immersive games cause they aren't beholden to realism (ie magic), but accepting indestructible weapons is more further than I'm willing to go.
The fact that you don't have to hunt down components to fix things and can just use a hammer for everything seems like enough of a reduction of realism to me to reduce the 'boring' or 'annoyance' factor
You basically just gave the definition of realism and then called it immersion.
Quote
noun: immersion
-the action of immersing someone or something in a liquid. "his back was still raw from immersion in the icy Atlantic Ocean" -deep mental involvement. "his immersion in Jewish culture" a method of teaching a foreign language by the exclusive use of that language, usually at a special school.
In the context of games I would say that it more specifically refers to a games ability to make you either forget you are playing a game (the pipe dream of game devs the world over) or allow you to feel personally connected to the consequences of actions or events taking place in the game.
If the goal of the game is to make you feel more connected to it, the last thing you want to do is drag them into menus unnecessarily. This rips away immersion by reminding the player/players very clearly that they are in a simulation. That is the only net effect of durability that relates to immersion and it is directly counter to the concept of immersion.
You can argue that it is realistic all day, that's fine, but immersive it is not and tedious it is.
