Oh man, I totally get that! I had a similar thing happen on my old route and what finally worked for me was just taking the regular local bus instead it was always exactly on time even if it took a few minutes longer.

The factory paste quality thing is a good point. Sony probably uses whatever they can get the cheapest bulk deal on that month so one batch might be great and another might be crap. I remember seeing a teardown of an early PS4 where the paste was almost liquid and another that was like dried clay. It probably depends on the factory in China or wherever too, different assembly lines could use different thermal compounds. So your experience could be totally different from someone else's even with the same model.

Does pulling the CMOS battery actually reset everything or just the clock settings lol

Wait you actually had paint lift off from it being too smooth?

Walked away from a similar setup last summer out in Phoenix where the crane's load chart was literally taped to the dash with duct tape (and I'm not joking, it was flapping in the breeze). Told the foreman I had to go pick up my kid from school early and drove home with my tail between my legs, feeling like a paranoid idiot. But then I heard through the grapevine that same crane tipped over three weeks later on a job in Mesa, so now I just tell people I got a sixth sense for sketchy machinery. Half a day's pay beats a lifetime of explaining to my wife why my spine sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies.