It's pretty bad when you consider that you have to limit it to just this use-case (3-6 second recordings 10-20 times a day), when it could have instead been useful for other things e.g. recording much longer thoughts or making notes while reading a book or watching a video.

Even for just the narrow use-case, 2 years is still pretty poor. I generally expect my tech to last a lot longer than that.

this seems to be optimised for the use case where you just want to record something quickly; if you wanted a longer recording session the up front overhead of pulling out a dictaphone or something wouldn't be too bad, and you would have better ergonomics than holding a button pressed and your hand to your face.