Someone thinks your comment is worthy of down voting, but you're absolutely correct.
Heat is a primary killer of many electronic things, including LED bulbs and their constituent parts.
And LEDs -- the diodes themselves -- do tend to become more efficient (in terms of lumens produced per Watt of input) when not pushed to their extreme operational limits.
And it is definitely possible to create a longer-lasting, more-efficient LED bulb.
It's absolutely trivial to do this, even: To start, just add more LEDs, reduce their individual RMS current, improve heat sinking and dissipation, and use better capacitors.
But it does cost more to do these things, and regular consumer products are all built down to a price.
> And LEDs -- the diodes themselves -- do tend to become more efficient (in terms of lumens produced per Watt of input) when not pushed to their extreme operational limits.
This isn’t some weird surprising tendency. The forward voltage (the amount of energy needed to shove each electron through the LED) increases with current, approximately according to the Shockley equation. The external quantum efficiency (photons out per electron in) is no more than 1, and tends to get lower at higher current [0]. The wavelength of the emitted photons is pretty much constant. So you get the best efficiency when the current, and hence voltage, is low.
Incandescent bulbs, in contrast, don’t have a meaningful quantum efficiency, and they produce a more useful spectrum as they get hotter.
Heat is a primary killer of many electronic things, including LED bulbs and their constituent parts.
And LEDs -- the diodes themselves -- do tend to become more efficient (in terms of lumens produced per Watt of input) when not pushed to their extreme operational limits.
And it is definitely possible to create a longer-lasting, more-efficient LED bulb.
It's absolutely trivial to do this, even: To start, just add more LEDs, reduce their individual RMS current, improve heat sinking and dissipation, and use better capacitors.
But it does cost more to do these things, and regular consumer products are all built down to a price.