From what I understood from Hardware Unboxed, running without hard power limits is essentially “supported” by Intel and motherboard manufacturers weren’t compelled to stick to the “recommended” power limits.

The fact that the new “Intel Baseline” profile that was pushed to motherboards via a BIOS update is vastly inconsistent between manufacturers leads be to believe that Intel doesn’t clearly state “do this and this as default”.

I find it a bit cheap to put the blame solely on motherboard manufacturers here.

There are also reports of instabilities with CPUs running at supposedly safe power limits. I can’t confirm this but I also wouldn’t be surprised if these power limits also caused silicon degradation at an unexpectedly fast pace.