You dodged a bullet.

VW has gone down the drain.

I understand your point, but have you driven a VW in the past decade? They are reliable, relatively easy to repair and have comfortable interiors that aren't with "hard plastic." Perhaps you've confused VW with Ford?

No doubt they are all overpriced, but I thoroughly researched my Škoda before buying it in 2020 and it was competitively priced, especially with its reliability score and relatively low maintenance cost. In my case of course anecdotal, but I've had no issues after 90,000 km with a lot of Autobahn.

Here the picture is very different, admittedly this is a German study, but by TÜV which is a very reputable company, the biggest company responsible for mandatory car safety checks at periodic intervals.

Stor undersøgelse: Her er bilmærkerne med flest fejl 

Vi er Europas største webshop for brugte reservedele fra autoophug i hele Europa.

(www.autoparts24.dk)

VW was never comparable to Toyota.

VW actually beats even Toyota, it's a couple of years old. But I doubt this has changed much.

This is a very solid stat, for a big country, and the checks are mandatory. So not dependent on brand methodology.

For instance here Tesla is said to be the cheapest car to maintain after purchase and under warranty. But they do a piss poor job, so a whopping third of the cars fail their first mandatory safety check after 4 years. (after that it's every 2nd year). No other brand is even close to as bad.
VW is among the more expensive, because they have very strict service requirements while under warranty. But I guarantee your chance of passing mandatory safety check is similar to the German, about 2% failure, compared to 33% failure for Tesla. The failures of Tesla are even pretty serious, like steering and brakes! While for other cars Steering is an unheard of failure.

In the study Tesla 3 is also the worst after 2-3 years, with 14.7% of the cars having a security problem!
So being cheapest is absolutely not a sign of being reliable!

There are many ways to make the stats, but the above study is in my opinion much more reliable than what you showed that is based on price, and AFAIK not based on mandatory safety checks.

Unfortunately we don't have the same amount of data here. So where Hyundai is is unknown, but definitely VW ranks clearly as #1.

As I strongly suspected the study you showed does not give an accurate picture of reliability.
It was just so obvious. The study I show is based on mandatory safety checks, that is equal for all cars.
And in that much more reliable and comparable study VW wins.