I can't even remember PCs now (been 10+ years on Macs) but heat is still an issue (especially in summer in hot climates) if the thing is going to throttle.
Heat is an issue with Macs too: if it wasn't, you'd have Air chassis with the performance of M4 Max/Ultra.
Yes, they've done some nice things to get the performance and energy efficiency up, but it's not like they've got some magic bullet either. From what I've seen in reviews, Intel is not so far off with things like Ultra 7 258V. If they caught up to TSCM on the process node, they would probably match Apple too.
I've got a laptop of the times when you switched to a Mac. It's warm in winter, which is nice, but not so warm to be a problem in summer. My workloads are mild, Django and Rails. Even the test suites are not CPU bound. Linux, not Windows.