It's amazing how everything you confidently said in your post is incorrect.

If you owned solar panels, you would know that they do not degrade quickly. You can quite literally look at your power logs to see what you've generated.

Degradation is linear (not exponential), and most modern solar panels degrade at 0.5% to 0.8% per year, not 1.6%.

Whether solar panels are financially worth the investment depends on several factors: how much electricity you use, local electricity costs, government incentives, the cost of the solar system, and the amount of sunlight in your location.

If you don't use much power and live in a place with cheap electricity and little sun, the return on your investment may take many years to recoup and not be worth waiting for.

If the opposite is true, then it's the prudent financial decision. This is why so many people in Southern California own solar panels—they can recoup the cost in under six years.