It's true that the Phoebus cartel arranged to have light bulbs die after a certain number of hours, but bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption. The cartel-defined lifetime limit sits very close to the sweet spot for all of those metrics for incandescent bulbs.
> bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption
At a specific temperature, using specific materials.
There is no reason to suspect that material science would not advance. Or other constraints would change. A specific company choosing that particular sweetspot for a particular product line is fine. But a collusion between companies dictating that specific constraint (in lieu of, e.g., wattage per lumen) is too clear a marker of anti-consumer intent.
>At a specific temperature, using specific materials.
The temperature of incandescent bulbs is directly related to the light that they give off, and tungsten is the obvious best material, there's no other materials on the horizon giving an improvement for the tech. It really is a pretty well understood tradeoff surface on a very mature technology (which was then displaced by completely different ones).
Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY