Something else I haven't really seen brought up, is hardware longevity vs generation longevity. Depending on how long the generation lasts, along with extra life due to potential cross gen years, the system can and probably will be built to last however long it needs to for that lifecycle. Electronics are not built to last forever.
We likely won't have a reasonably good idea about how long this gen will last until year 3 or 4 of the lifecycle. If the PS5 is meant to be the only model, beyond a slim, in terms of it's performance, then it may only have a 5 or 6 year lifecycle. If that's the case, the console typically would not be built with the same generational longevity in mind, so the hardware could be of lesser quality, or could be of average to high quality and pushed much closer to it's limits.
For all we know it could be a 10 year gen, in which case SNY's engineers no doubt were aware of this from the beginning and would have designed PS5 to last that long. Like how GN explains, just because a part has a rating, doesn't necessarily mean that's the breaking point. The manufacturer could very well be lowballing the max limits just to be on the safe side. SNY no doubt would have inquired about this and would be keeping those parts within their true hard limits if they needed to push the soft paper limits.
SNY knows well what screwing up with hardware meant to them with PS3, even when it came to cooling earlier on, and to solidify that they know what happened to the 360 in terms of rushing a product and it's overheating issues.
When it came to the PS4 they fixed many of the problems. Though as you solve old problems, new problems, that aren't really problems per say, tend to arise that didn't prior like, 'the console is too loud and we want it to be quieter'. Now even though people seemed to like the small sleek console design, they didn't like the noise which was a byproduct of that.
Then there's the XB1, that was a huge hideous monstrosity, in which even though it also certainly fixed the cooling problems and concerns, it was big and ugly, though quiet.
SNY has taken all of this and more into account with PS5. They didn't rush it, they made sure it was kept cool enough and quiet, which also meant a larger console, but they made sure that it wasn't some boring bland ugly box. They made it futuristic and elegant, which makes up for the size when it comes to most people, though some obviously weren't going to like it because you can't please everyone in every way. Some prefer a more simplistic approach or would rather put up with the noise of a small box.
SNY even made their own version of liquid metal for remarkable thermal transfer from the APU to the heatsink, They obviously went into great detail when designing this thing, and after 5 generations with many revisions of each console in each gen, not to mentions their competitors, it shouldn't be a huge surprise that they finally seem to have found the sweet spot overall in terms of hardware design. Even MS with the XBSS and XBSX have come so far in terms of building reliably marketable hardware.
I would also argue SNY as well as MS, hit the perfect price to performance ratio this time around. PS4 was close but certainly could have been slightly more performant especially when it came to the CPU, though they didn't have a lot of choices back then either. XB1 was just a price to performance disaster, especially in comparison to PS4.
Hats off to DF and GN (and a few others) for their in depth testing and analysis to prove it.
