In my case, the cans are 43 years old, I don't see any quick solution with spring clips there. They're part of a vaulted ceiling that rises to about 13 feet above the floor, so it's not something that I want to casually revisit, nor am I likely to stick my finger into the fixture. They're all IC (insulation-contact) rated, so I really don't want to play with them.
If you have cans with standard screw sockets in them they sell multi-packs of retrofit LED inserts that include a screw-in adapter with the new LED pigtail on it; the question there is mostly how the trim ring is set up on the existing fixture, IE, can it be easily removed so the insert can fit flush and if the friction clips of the replacement can get purchase... but, sure, you can just use bulbs.
I'd appreciate if you could share some native LED options that appear to be good quality. I've tried a number of LED replacement bulbs on some projects, and they've been iffy. I also have a project coming up that will be new fixtures completely, so I'd like to review what it is you are using.
My kitchen refit was with one of the Home Depot brands, but I forget which; probably either FEIT or Commercial Electric.
An interesting thing I notice when I look at the product details for these inserts is they're claiming a 50,000 hour lifespan (which at the "3 hours a day" that they seem to have standardized on for these claims works out to almost fifty years). By contrast, most of the A19-shaped screw-in bulbs are being rated at around 15,000 hours. That's still 17 years at three hours a day, which obviously is a lot longer than most people's experience says they last out in the wild, but it's still notable how much lower the manufacturers' expectations for that form-factor are. I really do suspect that most of the difference boils down to heat dissipation, in both the LED elements themselves and the driver circuitry.
Heck, those Far East-origin retrofit 4' lamps were rated at something like 3500 lumens at 6000K each. And they were horribly over-driven to get that brightness. I suspect that may be the case for your 2' fixture.
I have several very bright LED strips serving as aquarium lights (one was actually sold as an aquarium hood, the others were me taking LED strip lights designed to be mounted under kitchen cabinets and repurposing them; in one case I shoehorned a cute little 9" strip into the plastic shell of a small hood that used to eat CFL bulbs like delicious candy, while the other is just sitting on top of the aquarium's top because it was already in a nice splash-resistant shell) and they've all held up very well for years. I do think there is a gradual reduction in brightness over time, but it's not enough to be a problem yet(*). Again, I take this as evidence that native LED lamps, if even remotely well designed, just inherently work better than retrofits.
(*If you want to talk about LEDs dimming over time I do have some Christmas lights I could exhibit as prime examples. Blue ones in particular seem to suffer from it. Have a few strings that were positively radioactively bright when new that are now best described as "pastel".)
