All of the dead cards, if I open my drawer where I store them marked with a black cross-mark, are samsung evo cards. All my Sandisk Ultras (the real ones verified on Sandisk's chinese website) are still running fine after ~3-4 years of usage.

Anyway, Samsung Evos didn't hard fail for me. They just stopped executing writes (without reporting any errors). So your system seems to work (for a while), but after reboot it's back to where it was previously. It's a pretty stupid way to handle end-of-life condition for the card. I wish samsung decided to report write failures instead of simply ignoring the writes and reporting success.