With bottom-of-the-barrel (and/or "value add") IoT garbage, hardware suppliers are a commodity, and under competitive pressure, the winners will be ones that can make cheapest hardware that just about outlasts a typical warranty period of their customers' products. Shorter-lived parts will not bring repeat business; longer-lived parts will get value-optimized further. Failing just after warranty period is Just Right.
(Just look at Amazon marketplace if you think I’m exaggerating.)
Customers have been "noticing" this pattern for couple decades now; it's not just in tech, but everywhere across the board - from foodstuffs, through appliances, sports equipment, clothing, hygiene, all the way to computing. Unfortunately, this is a pattern in the same sense a tsunami is - you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
I do not have exact statistics but I believe that this is the most common failure mode of SD cards in embedded systems that we supply (but a friend who works for certain ARM and PowerPC SoC vendor told me that he has statistics that disprove my theory, so take that with a grain of salt).
