I concur partially with magnetic ballasts, Not so with Electronic Ballasts.
I have designed electronic ballasts for fluorescent lamps.
The magnetic ballast when energized produce excessive currents until the tube filament is hot.
During the heating period the filament suffers a kind of surface stripping, which shortens the filament life, one can notice this with old tubes that flicker for some time until the filament is hot enough to continue emitting electrons between AC voltage cycles.
For this reason ones needs to minimize such ON/OFF switching.
Electronic ballasts if properly designed do last a lot longer because the circuit can have a heating cycle to push the filament to get HOT fast in about 100 milliseconds, instead of 2 to 8 seconds for the magnetic ballast.
The electronic ballast now have available many Integrated Circuits that do such ON/OFF steps to minimize the filament life reduction.
I did a study, unhappily many years ago, where the ratio of ON/OFF cycles versus lamp life was determined, I do not remember the data, I only remember that if the filament was properly heated prior maximum plasma current continuous setting, the life of the lamp was practically defined by the ON time of the lamp.
This represent about same ON/OFF cycles and ON time for total hours life.
This was done with the early tri-phosphor tubes.
Presently, the best way is to send a message to the tube manufacturers asking this question, they do have such data, for sure, since that is one parameter that is needed to determine the total fluorescent lamp life.
By the way, there is an electroless ( filament-less) fluorescent lamp that may have the patent about to end, it has a life of about 100,000 hours, but the electronic ballasts is more expensive -- it is a RF ( Radio Transmitter) where the fluorescent lamp is in the output coil field to excite the internal gas by induction.
The lamps for such systems are not sold individually, they are sold with the RF ballast, also they do have a problem with RF field producing a lot of RF interference which make them unsuitable for many environments.
Nando