> So if that were the case then why isn't there some sore of daemon or system software service that tracks the expected life of the hardware?

Some linux distribution will regularly check SMART data from disk and warn you if some threshold has passed (like number of corrected errors, spin up/down, total hours etc).

That said, if we talk about consumer hardware in a home lab or the like, of the disks that I bought in the past 15 years, only one broke down, and it did fairly quickly so my suggestion is to use redundant storage, make backup and change the disk when it breaks down. (Enterprise disk and usage is another can of worms of course).