You really believe that? Feel free run your computer after you take off the heatsinks of your computer, removing all the fans, and removing all the heatsink paste if you truly believe heat doesn't degrade pc components. Feel free to post the results.
I don’t, because you are wrong about heat. Heat matters to everyone. If heat didn’t matter on regular timescales graphics cards would never break and crypto miners wouldn’t care about their hardware getting hot.
The 480 was probably barely used and the mining GPU are used at low power and controlled temperatures. It proves my point.
Old doesn’t mean heat abused. Gaming laptops or ones with discrete GPUs often have issues and it’s always because of the GPU. If it posts it doesn’t mean that the GPU won’t die soon or is problem free, gaming laptops have the most heat abuse and are constantly dying and having issues. Performance degradation because it’s old is a different claim from saying heat damage doesn’t exist.