After 2 years of hobby use, my 20W laser is down to about 50% power. Have replaced protective lens, does not help. Sculpfun were of no assistance apart from offering a 10% discount of new price. Laser was fantastic when new, but not much use now. I would have expected many more years of use before any significant power loss. Mechanically machine is great.
This heavily depends on your usage and environmental factors like ambient temperature. Diodes degrade heavily once they reach an operating temperature above 30 °C. So if you have a hot summer, you might even damage the diode while running at 20% power (just as an example).
Since the laser heads are only cooled with ambient air, this is often a crucial factor. In my opinion, two years can be a good life span.
Did I understand that you replaced the lens just now? This might be also part of the problem, because the optical lenses might also have suffered if the protective lens was dirty. You should clean it every few hours of usage, depending on materials etc.
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I have been using diode lasers for the last 10 years and have never had this problem with other brands. My laser room is air conditioned and insulated. Also an exhaust system to remove any fumes etc .never more than 25C in the room and lser never been used at 100% power.
I can only tell by my experience, which is shorter (about 4-5 years of diode laser support). What I can derive from that is that I heard such reports from all brands, though I don’t know the circumstances (you can never know what people did with their lasers 
).
What I think is that during the last 5 years the competition has become very strong and manufacturers try to get ahead by maximizing everything (also like increasing power slightly above maximum), which is usually not good for device lifetime…
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