I very much doubt that Netgear are any more susceptible to this problem than any other manufacturer of domestic electronic equipment. Price is always a big issue in their component sourcing, and cheap electrolytic capacitors are widely used. If Netgears were noticeably less reliable than other makes it would very quickly get about.
I'm sure you're right, and I'd not really want to put other people off Netgear. I used to repair radios for pocket-money as a teenager in the 70s and, even then, failure of electrolytics probably accounted for about 50% of all faults. But if that wiki article is to be believed (and note that it IS disputed), then certain capacitor brands, and vintages (especially the early noughties), are much more failure-prone than others.
In addition, routers tend to run 24/7, whereas most cheap electrolytics have a rated life specified in terms of failure rate after a couple of thousand hours or so. Moreover, routers tend to run hot, which will only make matters worse. I'd happily have paid a few bucks more for quality components or even, as you suggest, tantalum caps. The unfortunate reallity however is that I suspect people don't rate life-excectancy very high on their wish lists when choosing gadgets, and Netgear do have to be price-competitive.
I stress that I'm not singling out Netgear, though . If you google for strings like '+router +bulging +capacitors' then you get lots of hits, but nothing to suggest Netgears are any worse than others.