Waiting to turns the fans on is actually a GOOD thing, thermal cycling is what destroys GPUs, not running hot. It's better for a card to sit at 80C for 10 hours then to cycle between 40C and 80C 10 times in 10 hours.
where they screw up, as you said, is not kicking the fans on fast enough, usually for noise reasons, shame there's no "cool temp" option in drivers. I always crank mine up to limit max temps but the zero RPM option says because its frankly better for the card itself.
Zotac was once known for subpar heatsinks. Even with new paste the cooler may always suck. Also depends on case, modern cases runa lot hotter then older designs.
I get the whole thermal cycling thing, so yes in that sense even the fan-stop modes is actually helpful somewhat to potential lifespan... I just don't necessarily agree that the thermal window should sit quite as high - at the end of the day it is additional thermal expansion, they aren't using superconductors which are largely unaffected by temperature, and all of the other board parts do essentially soak up some of that GPU heat aside from potentially cheapo VRMs which also need help staying cool but also loose efficiency and lifespan as they get hotter.
As for the noise aspect, of course that is a design consideration... but so is making a card with a 300W+ TDP - the fact they have morphed into these 3+ width slot coolers and are using the last half of the card heatsink/shroud to blow heat through into the case for whatever other cooling you have to deal with it leaves me with little sympathy towards the designers in that sense as, essentially, you 'need' more than 1 in/out case fans to deal with that which is also additional noise even if the card is now a bit quieter.
Yeah the blower style ones were louder, but even the older GTX Titan's with blower style were only 2 slot width (50% of which was lost to IO connectors)... I do wonder how much better / capable a 3-slot+ wide blower cooler would work - would still be louder but probably much more effective vs 2-wide... might still struggle with 300W TDP though.
Also, I'd go 50/50 with older/newer cases being better for managing heat. Generally a lot of the cheaper cases these days are much much better design in terms of trying to manage heat / airflow vs old cheap cases. More expensive cases generally were better off in that regard but now ironically are designed more for style in some cases. Definitely newer SFF profile cases are much more designed to cooling than before where the priority was 'small'.
