In the late 2000s I remember hearing of PC laptops which if left in the BIOS setup would overheat and shut down due to the fan control being exclusively done by OS drivers, so this sort of "planned fragility" isn't exclusive to Apple.
I had one such laptop. It was always a crapshoot whether Windows updates (the big ones where it rebooted one or more times) would succeed or not before the laptop overheated and shut down. The reason was that the BIOS didn't do any power management and would always run the CPU at maximum power with the fans blowing like a jet engine. It was only once Windows (or Linux) was fully booted that they would take over and do proper power management. But the Windows updates were so slow that they would often spend too much time in that pre-boot environment leading to overheating and shutdown.
No one thinks "let the fans stay off and overheat" is a good idea unless they were convinced to do that against their common sense. Other manufacturers' models either had the expected automatic fan control via EC firmware, or defaulted to the fans being on some intermediate speed.
