aren't all recharchables stated as having a battery life of..... "x recharge cycles"?

Rechargeable batteries ARE marketed that way, but the reality (as usual) is more complex.

Many rechargeable batteries fall short of their potential cycle lifespan, mostly due to cheap/badly designed chargers.
If you are using a poorly designed charger, that is likely to be the major factor in how long your batteries last.

With a good charger, you will get more service life from a NiCD or NiMH battery if you run it down farther between recharges (hopefully getting more hours or days of service from each charge).

On the other hand, if you over discharge the batteries between recharges, THAT will also reduce their capacity and shorten their lifespan.

Devices that use a multi-cell NiCD or NiMH battery pack often will operate until some minimum voltage output from the battery pack is no longer available (and the device turns itself off). If that minimum voltage happens to allow ANY of the cells within the pack (especially if those cells are not perfectly matched in capacity/voltage characteristics) to drop below the minimum allowed voltage per cell, then that cell is internally stressed and is aged more rapidly than the others in the pack.

Subsequent deep discharges will result in that same cell being the first to reach critical level, but the device keeps drawing power until the overall pack output drops enough, so the "weak" cell gets more beat up every time the pack is heavily discharged. Eventually that cell becomes so degraded that even a fully charged pack doesn't last long before the weak cell's output brings the whole pack's voltage output down below minimum required for the device to operate.

I would suggest, if you are trying to maximize NiCd or NiMH battery pack life, that you endeavor to discharge the batteries "most of the way" between charges, but not try to run them into the ground each time, and recharge them promptly and fully.

If you suspect your charger is of the variety that continues to push power into the batteries after they have been fully charged, then take them out of the charger shortly after they have been recharged.

"Fast" chargers that recharge a fully discharged battery pack in an hour or two SHOULD have some sort of indicator that they are done, and SHOULD also stop charging the batteries. Unfortunately, many chargers don't fully stop, they just back off to a "top off" or "trickle charge" level. If that slower charge level is pushed for more than 30 minutes or so, you are overcharging those batteries, and they will degrade.

"Slow" chargers, that take many hours to recharge the battery pack, are often very simple designs that push power into the batteries at a constant rate, regardless of whether the battery needs it. These are killers, as the battery spends many hours being overcharged.