Ahh I see, I did not know that the UV blocking dopant affected the quartz like that. Makes sense.

@Medved
I have heard of those fixtures with integral starters as well, similar idea.

@RRK
I never really considered that it might be anything other than a glow starter, but I suppose that is possible. That would certainly be better.

It is a real shame there isn't any free space inside circline lamps. Of course you could make them so that the base is bulkier (less tube, more base) but at that point it's too much effort.

You do have a point that EOL lamps are likely to be noticed faster in a residential environment. And even if the starter does go bad, the ballast isn't useless. Just needs an external starter (if you have space for it), then you are back in business.

Over here in Southeastern PA, we got around a foot, with about 1.5-2.0ft snow drifts.

@wide-lite 1000 — ditto on the snowblower and low temps for the next 7-10 days!

Good glow starters in fact last a lot. And probably can outlast a few tubes if not abused by constantly blinking an EOL tube. BTW, at home there is a better possibility someone will notice an EOL tube timely and turn it off and replace quickly.

Some decent ballasts use way more long lasting starters (like thermal starters - a bimetal switch with heater connected in series with the working circuit, then way later indeed some form of electronic/FEC starters), but there really were products using regular glowbottle starter as a non replaceable component.
Have seen these not as ballasts, but as parts of light fixtures, those very cheap kitchen undercabinet T5 fluorescent lights, before the cheepeese electronic ballasts took over. These were really able to last only as long as the tube did.

Preheat-start ballasts exist which have integral starters. This means they have the typical four wires of an RS or TS ballast, but the characteristics of a preheat ballast. This seems to be more common for circline lamps for some reason. Here is a schematic I drew of what is likely inside these:
https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=0&pid=265862

Glow starters go bad. So much so that manufacturers felt the need to integrate them into the bases of some single-ended fluorescents to make replacement more simple. Because they go bad, they should be easily replaceable. This is usually facilitated by a socket that is accessible without fixture disassembly. So what did they choose to do with these integral-starter "self-start" ballasts? They potted the starter in tar, inside of a non-accessible component that is supposed to be a non-consumable, the ballast. Great idea.

I get that it is for space-saving purposes, especially for circline fixtures. But why didn't they just integrate the starter into the base of the circline lamp? What is the point of this buffoonery?

Sure the integrated potted part is just a glow-bottle starter and not some electronic circuitry?

In practice, unlike PL lamps deliberately made with a starter compartment in the base, there is *no* free space in the circline base. You can check by yourself, circline bases are usually easy to open by removing a single screw.

Circline lampholders typically compensate for this by adding a starter socket right near the lamp socket.

In the real life, all electronic ballasts sharing this topology, half bridge + split capacitor, that I have on hand, Philps's and Osrams, have their capacitors significantly up-rated by voltage. 315-350V caps for expected Vbus of around 400V. So even a serious imbalance is *not a problem*.

And of course, all modern electronic ballasts are driven by some microcontroller brains, so in the case the lamp attempts to cycle, they will shut down after a programmed number of tries, also the most sophisticated ones will report this by DALI, for example.
 

The arctube quartz has to handle way more than just some distributed heat, so using anything that may affect the material is not that good idea. The outer bulb would need to be used anyway and it would have to be quartz as well because of the temperatures, so it is easier to really optimize the arctube material to work best for the arctube and handle the rest in the way less stressed outer.

It is just abuse of nonexpert buyers, a result of predatory marketing and completely absent consumer protection.
A way to make the things really cheap even when that means it can barely survive a single lamp (as a failing lamp tends to kill the starter, that is the reason why both needs to be replaced together) and hide that from the customers.

For the rectification cutout it does matter what is the exact ballast output topology, whether it can deliver DC current or not. If yes (e.g. when using full bridge output stage), there is no need for rectification cutout, rectification is not endangering anything. And given the square wave frequency (150..400Hz), even when it lights only for one halfwave, the resulting flicker won't be that a problem.
But if the output stage is a halfbridge against a center point between capacitors, the ballast must shut off when the center point is imbalanced too much in order to protect those capacitors from overvoltage (they are designed so the bus voltage is split among them, imbalance causes one of them getting way higher voltage and so may exceed its rating).
Some halfbridge ballasts may address this by just adjusting the duty ratio of the square wave, so if one polarity yields lower current, it is let to flow the longer time and maintaining the center voltage this way. Then there wil be some limits set how far the duty ratio may go, shutting down when that would be too much.