You mean everyone who owns a motherboard from a manufacturer that was given unclear guidance on power delivery from Intel, but also encouraged to make sure their boards benchmarked competitively (by providing enough voltage for clock boosts)? That's pretty much every enthusiast.
Right, so maybe a better phrasing would be: They had a design flaw and the voltage they run the CPU would actually be over the limits of what the hardware can tolerate.
Those who pushed their CPU to its maximum loads damaged their CPU physically and these are now cooked. The microcode update will limit the voltage, which will result in degraded performance but will prevent damage under load.
I don't think you intend it, but your explanations read as pushing culpability to the end user. Running Chrome, webpack, and Docker at the same time will get me to maximum load. Am I at fault for that?
The YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead has info from Intel leakers (grain of salt) that the ring bus is most sensitive to overvoltage and is what's failing. In addition, the leakers say that with Intel's poor earnings they've been under pressure to ship higher margin parts (like a 14900K over a 14700K), and that they've been relaxing the binning standards to ship chips that barely meet the standard as 14900Ks. This is one of reasons 900K parts seem to be most affected.
In the channel's analysis, this overbinning exacerbates the failure rate as more cores require more power/voltage delivered to the common power rail the ring bus shares. This is why disabling E cores seems to help stability. This also leads him to conclude that if ring bus failure is on this knife's edge, then those who haven't experienced it likely have golden samples that fully meet the binning standards.
All of this is to say: damage has little to do with the workload you've run, and everything to do with your silicon lottery luck on the chip you got.
You mean everyone who owns a motherboard from a manufacturer that was given unclear guidance on power delivery from Intel, but also encouraged to make sure their boards benchmarked competitively (by providing enough voltage for clock boosts)? That's pretty much every enthusiast.