You are right I don't have emperic data. Maybe I'm wrong.

The reason I believe that retention is higher until you exhaust the cell cycles is explained in the article. For instance, the reason why the active temperature during which writes were done is because lower temperature during such time will somehow strain cells more. But that effect will be noticable if you are close to exhaustion of the cell cycles. Let's say that 3000 write cycles at temperature best for retention are equal to 2000 write cycles at suboptimal temperatures (that's on the pessimistic side I believe).

Well, that's order(s) of magnitude less than the amount of writes a normal user does. The cycles I've used should be ~60 out of 3000. If I've used 2 orders of magnitude less cycles than the product is designed to survive, I expect to have retention which is at least a multiple of the guaranteed one after all cycles (1 year).

In other words, what makes SSDs to eventually fail reads is that the cells can't hold charge. They can't hold charge because the insulation has been damaged ("by design"). At 2% of the designed cycles, the cells are almost brand new, retention of electrons within cells is great.