I’ve had the i9 MBP with the 5500m from launch and it was always hot and noisy fwiw. For most people just having a second monitor plugged in made the fans always run because of a voltage issue. I sincerely doubt Apple needs to intentionally make it any worse. I hate that laptop!
I also remember my macbook unibody 2008 and mbp 2012, with them I could do a lot with 4gb ram, even on hdd, nowadays 8gb is kinda too small for most of programming jobs, it look like macs keep getting better hardware every year and macOS using it more and more aggressively