Since the article never answered the question, do you know what happened to the 100k hours LED bulbs? Were the initial estimates just over-optimistic? Was it all marketing hype?
I can only guess that the marketing department wanted to put the biggest numbers forward against what was plausible calculations for the early LED lifetimes.
I know for a fact that some of the testing houses have done extended on/off cycle testing for some of the big box retailers looking to keep the lamp vendors honest on real lifetime performance of A19 class bulbs. I've been in such a test chamber.