There is truth to this in aerospace: components will be qualified to the design life of the vehicle, but the qualification campaign is intentionally conservativ

There is truth to this in aerospace: components will be qualified to the design life of the vehicle, but the qualification campaign is intentionally conservative to envelope all possibilities and uncertainty. When the actual conditions are more benign, more life can generally be expected. Additionally as another case, Hubble has been continuously losing gyroscopes since it was first launched. Some or all gyros were replaced during most shuttle servicing missions. Seeing the writing on the wall for servicing missions post-Columbia, NASA developed software to operate with fewer gyros at a time, allowing for fewer to be spun up at any time, but importantly, allowing for the telescope to continue to operate after more than 3 of 6 gyros had failed. The key here is that engineers can often coax more performance out of a damaged (or otherwise limited) subsystem given the incentive- this has been the case in my aerospace experience, and seemed mirrored with Hubble too.