There were definitely some problems with caps back in the early 2000s. Apparently it was a problem with industrial espionage gone awry. The story I've heard is that some cheap cap manufacturer in either China or Malaysia stole the dielectric formula from an established manufacturer (I believe Japanese) but either forgot a component or omitted it to save cost. The caps worked OK initially without this component of the dielectric, but they degraded very quickly. To make matters worse, several other cap manufacturers apparently adopted this "cheaper" formulation after seeing that it apparently worked. This resulted in problems being pretty widespread until everybody figured things out again.
Of course, this only applies to caps that are properly spec'd in the first place. Capacitance and temperature rating are far from the only specifications on a capacitor. ESR, ESL, design lifetime, rated temperature, dissipation factor, etc. all matter, too. What inevitably happens is that the engineer in charge of the design spec's a part, then it gets substituted by some bean counter to "cost reduce" things based only on the "major" specs of capacitance, voltage rating, and case size. In some cases, a special capacitor is needed to meet safety requirements (e.g. X or Y rated). These are usually marked "engineering approval required for substitution", but sometimes people don't pay attention. Fires sometimes result.
And, well, sometimes the engineer in charge on the design doesn't get the cap spec'd right in the first place
As to resistors, they too have several parameters that matter other than resistance and rated power handling. The most frequently cited is tolerance. A common "secondary" characteristic is the inductance of the resistor, but other things matter. In some situations, the behavior of the resistor when presented with a sudden current surge matters (extremely short-term overage of the power handling of the device - not enough to actually heat it up, but lots of current). Thick film resistors will often pop open, while film resistors usually survive. Sometimes, there's a safety aspect, too. In some cases, it could be catastrophic for a resistor to fail as a short, while failing as an open is at least safe, even if it causes the device to work (or, occasionally, vice-versa). Again, improper substitutions can result in fire or similar unsafe situations. There are also things like temperature coefficient, and I'm sure plenty of others not coming to mind, now.
Isn't electronic design fun?