Let me think - the reset button can only work when the light is powered up (and maybe too hot to touch) - you can't mount it on the metal base because that's live when it's on, and so the light fitting is designed so you can't touch the base. you could mount it in the glass but it would cast a shadow ...
> Let me think - the reset button can only work when the light is powered up (and maybe too hot to touch)
A capacitor that is kept charged during normal operation, and that powers the reset circuit which you close with your metal pin once you unscrew the bulb. The circuit flips some bits in persistent memory of the bulb.
No. "Reset" is done by a circuit, and the only way to power it is by connecting that capacitor to it by pushing something into the reset pinhole. If you don't do that, capacitor eventually discharges but since the circuit never gets powered, no reset happens. So after a while you need to connect the bulb to mains power in order to be able to perform reset.
It’s a heat sink that gets hot to to the touch, though not that quickly as your talking ~10w of waste heat. Sill several ways to do a reset switch just after power is off.
Firmware is likely to be stored in flash memory, which is far more resilient to cosmic rays than SRAM or DRAM. You might find a bitflip is so unlikely it's far below the other in-service failure rates and you'd rather just handle the returns. Of course, a reset is still useful for other reasons. All assuming you don't use the bulbs in your airplane/space shuttle!
As to firmware, cosmic rays for example randomly flip bits. Which means for any large scale deployments you want a reset option.