If you buy a well known good SSD, it will last you a long time too. The difference is that all the really shoddy hard drive manufacturers faded away ages ago. The SSD field on the other hand has all kinds of bad manufacturers cranking out crap, leading to the horror stories. SSDs are also just manufactured chips, much like most of the other components in your system. Sometimes bad batches occur, leading to bad batches of SSDs.

Basically if you follow a proper backup plan, you have nothing to worry about beyond some downtime if a drive fails. That downtime is likely to be much shorter then the time gained due to SSD benefits. And trust me, the benefits are quite huge if you deal with any I/O intensive workloads.

Oh, and remember every single empeg made has an "SSD" sitting inside it, in the form of the flash chip saving settings. How many of those have failed over the years? I can't remember any specific threads here about flash failure. All about sourcing good components.