[G6Tanuki]

I don't see this as a 'conspiracy'.

You can make an old-style incandescent filament-bulb that will have a spectacularly-long life - but it will be rather inefficient in converting volts/amps into Lumens.

Equally, you can make an old-style incadescent-filament bulb that will have a spectacularly-short life - and it will be great at converting volts/amps into Lumens.

The little MES bulbs used in battery-powered cycle-lamps/pocket-torches/flashlights fit into the latter catrgory: the 'expensive' bit in the equation is the cost of the battery so running them 'hot' and sacrificing bulb-life to get the most-lumens-from-your-battery makes sense. The bulbs may only have a life of a few hours.

Similar MES bulbs used in commercial/industrial indicator-panels, car-sidelights or the festoon-bulbs in bell-pushes, well there you don't really worry about power consumption but having to replace the bulbs every few hours [or having a warning-indication missed because the bulb had blown] is expensive, so you design the bulb for long-life at the cost of poor energy-efficiency.

This isn't a 'conspiracy', it's pure economic sense. Would you want a 100-Watt incandescent domestic bulb to last for 100,000 hours if - in doing so - it was so inefficient it cost more in power than the cost of a few spectacularly-more-efficient-but-somewhat-shorter-lifed equivalents?

The same applies to modern LEDs: I'm happy to buy cheap-but-overdriven GU10 LEDs which I know will fail after a couple of years. The technology's progressing so fast that the replacements will invariably be more-efficient/more-economical-to-run than the failed ones I hurl into the trash.