A tip and a warning - if this helps one person avoid an Ecoboom disaster, then it's worth it.
This also applies to any other car with a wet belt, but Ecoboosts are particularly nightmarish to deal with if (when) they go wrong because of how big of a job it is to change the wet belt.
When I purchased my car a few years ago, my idea was to buy a car that had done its initial post MOT-free depreciation and would last the next 100k+ miles - so I got one that was just over 20k mileage and paid off the finance as soon as I could to avoid paying the interest, so I was able to save £1k of interest that way.
I had it serviced every year, approx. every 10k miles, which is more often than Ford's 18k/2 year recommendation.
The car was a 2019 Mk4 1.0L Ecoboost Focus automatic, which has a timing chain and a wet oil pump belt. This was supposed to fix the issues which were well documented in the MK3 Focus engines, but it does not as they retained the wet oil pump belt.
The car only reached 56k before the wet oil pump belt shredded, starving the engine of oil and causing damage with metal present in the sump which is likely to be parts of the bearings. I was lucky enough that it didn't totally destroy it, and I was able to spend £1.5k to replace the wet belt and then sell the car on to a dealer for £7.5k. Ford were not interested at all in offering goodwill towards this, and there is no recall on these models.
This was supposed to be a sensible financial decision to avoid paying high maintenance costs on an old car (sort of bangernomics), and I could have easily lost over £7k just before Christmas. No car on 56k miles at this age should be blowing up when serviced every year, and it is shocking that Ford offer no assistance when it does. Your only options are often an entirely new engine (~9k from Ford, or 4k from Pumaspeed) or to scrap the car for a few hundred.
In the end, I bought a Toyota Auris instead. I have heard similar disastrous stories about the Stellantis Puretech 1.2l engines.
Even in the best possible case where you are lucky enough to catch a degrading wet belt in time, you're paying £1-2k every time you replace it which in reality should be done every 30-40k or so instead of Ford's recommended 150k which is insane (ever heard of an Ecoboost belt lasting that long?). Additionally, most garages won't touch the wet belt job as it's so hard to get to and replace it. If you do choose to keep it you must service with the right spec oil (many garages don't have this as standard).
So, why not buy similarly priced non wet belt competitor cars where you don't have this guaranteed cost and risk of sudden catastrophic failure which will cause a big financial hit that may be extremely unaffordable to many, especially if they still have outstanding finance.
This happened just before the birth of my second child and caused no end of stress. I hope other families can avoid this by not buying a Ford Ecoboost.