Early SSDs had issues with "stuttering" or untimely demises. Sequential reading might go pretty fast, but randomly writing lots of small files, like an OS does, could slow the drive dramatically.
Indeed, there was numerous issues with early SSD's. One of the fixes was TRIM. In the early SSD days, which is only a few years back, sequential read was actually slower compared to HDD's, it was random read/write performance where SSD's really made a difference. These days, SSD's have improved massively and you need to use a PCIe interface to take full advantage of the SSD.
These days SSD controllers apparently are much improved and much of the early problems sorted or at least brought under better control. Still one should leave a significant part of the drive allocated for over-provisioning to extend the longevity and durability of the SSD.
That is certainly true and picking the right drive for your use case certainly makes a difference, just take a look at the endurance test I linked earlier.
Although modern SSDs should be amazingly efficient in withstanding massive write operations over time, it is a worrying fact that the drives might suddenly die when the wear levelling no longer can provide healthy data blocks for writing. Even more worrisome, the read-out capability tends to be intact at the point of drive death, but of no use since the drive throws in its towel completely to become totally bricked.
Again, based on the endurance test linked earlier, it does indeed seem to be the case that the controllers aren't entirely bug free (nothing really is), which means drives might become brick'ed before expected. That happened to the Samsung 840 Pro drive, but it didn't happen until after they had written 2.4PB of data to the drive. The other drives didn't last as long, but gave warnings well before they failed.
Perhaps as a safety measure one should replace SSDs with fresh drives on a 3-5 year cycle. One tends to get equal or bigger capacity for less money as well in this scheme.
I personally have bigger faith in SSD's, but with your history of failures, I understand the concern. However, in laptops like my rMBP, it's not really possible.
