Practical examples of magnetic ballasts dying prematurely without much abuse:
Cheapo 600mm 4x18W modular ceiling luminaires at my old workplace. Of course stuffed with smallest and the shittiest possible Chinese ballasts. EEI=B2 and this probably is still a fake index. Not a thermally challenging luminaire, not much power and quite large internal volume. At lamp EOL and stuck starters many of them got yellowed and become dead short and burned out. In my youth I have seen many old-school magnetic preheat ballasts, none of them suffered when they encountered lamp EOL.
Also, for some reason, a couple of 'sausage' 11W PL-L ballasts of mine developed short windings and excessive lamp current after may be ~ten years of use. Again not thermally challenged, first one of them might get hit by a lightning spike on a rural power network, though.
Regarding capacitors, back in the Soviet time paper / metal film capacitors were in use. They were made in hermetically soldered metal cases with glass insulators and could be regarded as very reliable. The filler was a simple benign hydrocarbon wax, based on the smell. They were large, for sure. PCB capacitors appeared briefly probably in mid-1970s and I remember that chemical naphtalene-like aromatic smell. This oil was called 'sovol'. Sovol capacitors were may be 2-3 times smaller by volume, probably as a result of high dielectric constant of PCB oil. At that time we did not know the stuff is so nasty. Still, not very much risk from a brief contact with guts of a single capacitor if you don't eat them
