Consoles have design lifetimes, and thermals are part of the computation that helps you figure out if your components are going to last as long as the warranty. Obviously, if you run a chip hot, its service life will be reduced. So companies develop models that tell them how long things like the SOC (main chip with CPU, etc.) will last for a given temperature and use frequency, and whether or not they've got a 1-year…
Hopefully the industry has improved their estimates since the Xbox 360
I was talking to an old colleague of mine that was an electronics engineer, and apparently, the issue with the xbox 360 was that the heat inside the case made the solder a bit more softer than expected. This would not be an issue for a horizontally positioned xbox 360, but when placed on it's side (which a lot of people did), this caused extremely slow shifting of certain components on the motherboard towards the direction of gravity. After (for most people) a few years, certain components would shift enough to not have proper contact with the board.
I was offered the analogy of the long-standing pitch viscocity experiment - everything is technically a liquid, just to wildly different degrees.
Not sure if this is true though, it was many years ago!