Re: Blame
I see your point that hardware that can be killed by software is something you'd intuitively expect not to happen, but unfortunately this has been happening for a very, very long time.
CPUs have moved beyond the short period of time where they couldn't cope with incompetent installation (old AMD CPUs with no heatsink=bang). GPUs require active management and have for years. The firmware appears to be better these days in terms of power management and throttling, but there's a lot of hardware that has to be tweaked in a very specific way in order to work well and at the highest performance.
It just isn't safe to blindly poke ports to 'see what happens'