He said he found it amusing as a child because it would cause buttons to either shatter or pop off and ping around the room. Now that I'm older I realized many of his stories were fabricated (fabric, get it?) and I feel like if it were true, people would be constantly sewing buttons back on after each wash.
Edit I should specify my question is... Is it true? Was it actually the case they had to constantly replace buttons?
They still exist. In the US it was called a wringer. Note the adjusting knob on top? That's what you'd use to adjust for more or less force. If you've got some cotton socks, perhaps they could be squeezed a lot, but you see the problem? Maybe you adjust for socks, and then absentmindedly run a shirt through, and pop go the buttons. Also, you can imagine how a button could be pulled flat against the rollers and either broken - or torn off. It took some care to make one of these work.
There are still figures of speech from these, like "he really put me through the wringer".