As the article eludes to, cheap components are used for the power conversion, likely on purpose. The LED's last a really long time, but the diodes and cheap over-engineered switching power supplies appear to use under-rated parts. It makes sense. 100k hour bulbs are not good business.
So by designing our own custom power conversion components we could reach 100 000 hours ?
Yes. I have several lights comprised of LED's and simple power supplies I built ages ago. They are dirt simple, but probably not as cost effective to make. Mine use a small transformer, full wave bridge rectifiers, a couple capacitors and a few resistors in parallel. Nowadays, you could make a small switching power supply, like those found in laptop power supplies, but smaller... but I know that won't happen because the bulb would cost several times more.