Early in my career, before "turbo" or "boost" frequencies were a thing in commodity CPU products, I heard a similar tale about boosting the speed of the signal processors in a defensive radar system.
The thought was that you would rather overheat and perform the calculation than protect the circuit and lose the ship. It's kind of a hail mary strategy. It definitely gave me a visceral feeling for how one should be ready to re-frame their systems analyses, even if apocryphal.
There are in service commercial planes that need to be routinely rebooted to prevent counters from overflowing, so I really wouldn't be surprised about similar sorts of issues in single use devices.
They profiled the memory leak and gave the chip enough RAM that it wouldn't fill up before the missile exploded. Problem solved!