Arrowhead Studios' CEO, Jonah Pilestedt, has said that a Helldiver's life expectancy is 2 minutes. This goes along perfectly with the Helldiver reinforcement budget of 20 in the longest length 40 minute missions - any more fatalities than that in 40 minutes thus causes Super Earth to get cold feet over the mission and consider just cutting their losses. After the reinforcement budget of 20 is overdrawn, the Helldivers have to survive for another 2 minutes before another Helldiver will be cleared to reinforce them to prove that the ones planetside aren't going to continue to die at a rate faster than Super Earth's expectations.
A Terminid Charger's actual weakest spot isn't its rear end, but its legs. Blasting the armor off a leg via a Railgun or Autocannon and shooting the exposed leg a few times will kill it. This can likely be attributed to the Square-Cube Law, especially with such an armored, heavy and large body — by taking out one of its legs, the Charger's remaining legs cannot support its own weight, and get crushed to the point where internal bleeding takes out the creature. A Bile Titan's longer and even more heavily armored legs means it doesn't fall to this as easily, despite being far bigger. This same principle applies for a Factory Strider's kneecaps, by taking out one of its knees, its other three legs won't be able to support its weight and it'll fall over, becoming useless and forced to self-destruct.
Helldivers aren't just frozen to keep their (minimal) training fresh or cut down on operation costs. The Helldivers contract, which all recruits agree to simply by being within 15 meters of, declares both that the Helldivers and their families are responsible for all operational costs incurred, and that they are paid following service. The Super Earth government really wants to make sure they're not paying their soldiers a single red Super Credit either by having them die quickly, or having them drum up incredible debt with barely any earning time.
There's some disturbing clues that the Automatons may not be fully inorganic. In some of their camps Helldivers can find the remains of humans with their heads cut open to remove the brain, while cages imply a deliberate effort to capture humans for some unknown purpose. This all seems to imply that the Automatons aren't merely mindless drones, but an evolution of their Cyborg creators with all but the most necessary organic components removed. It also raises the frightening possibility that the Automatons could be using Helldivers to increase their numbers. Basically any Helldiver corpse could become a new Automaton as long as their brain is sufficiently intact and be turned against their former comrades.
The subjects of the "Evacuate High-Value Assets" planetary defense missions are actually hundreds of frozen Helldivers locked in storage. Combined with the mission briefing that the "assets" were sequestered since the First Galactic War, over a century before Helldivers 2 takes place, it becomes even more apparent just how little Super Earth cares about Helldivers' wellbeing, how oblivious recruits are to what they signed up for, and how paranoid the government is that they would lock away their soldiers for so long. Of course, this is ultimately little surprise considering how much of a Crapsack World the Super Earth government is.
It also means that all those Helldivers who survived the First Galactic War never got to go home. Their families never saw them again, and even if they somehow were allowed to go back to civilian life should they survive this new war (which is highly unlikely, not only because of a Helldiver's short life expectancy on the battlefield but also because, if Super Earth put them back in the freezer after the first War, it'll most likely happen again after this new War), they'll find themselves in a world where each and every one of their relatives and friends are long dead. And, since Helldivers are only let out of their pods to be deployed on a mission before being stuffed back in the fridge if they survive, they most likely don't even know that so many time has passed. For them, the first Galactic War was just yesterday. They completed a mission, went back into their cryo pod as usual... And were then left dormant for 100 years.
Stims are, of course, actually highly addictive despite unprompted claims to the contrary from a loading screen tip. It's just Helldivers pretty much never live long enough for this to actually become a problem for any of them and provide an example for otherwise.
. This goes along perfectly with the Helldiver reinforcement budget of 20 in the longest length 40 minute missions - any more fatalities than that in 40 minutes thus causes Super Earth to get cold feet over the mission and consider just cutting their losses. After the reinforcement budget of 20 is overdrawn, the Helldivers have to survive for another 2 minutes before another Helldiver will be cleared to reinforce them to prove that the ones planetside aren't going to continue to die at a rate faster than Super Earth's expectations.