Oh boy the Tom's Hardware "scandal". That story was 100% planted by Intel. I think it was the K6, If the cooler dropped off, entirely the AMD thermal safety didn't react quickly enough. In my 40 years in IT I have NEVER heard about a cooler falling off the socket even once, except for that paid for cesspool of shit article.
That story together with the 180° they did on RAMBUS to favor P4 have made me NEVER use TOM's Hardware since. It was 100% dishonest paid for shilling. Either that or so idiotic it's not worth reading either way.
Even you mentioning that now about 30 years later, it still pisses me off. 🤬 🤬 🤬
Never heard about heat problems with Athlon, and P3 and P4 weren't great overclockers either. Celeron was great, because you could up FSB 50%, Which made it actually faster than the top P3.
EDIT PS:
No there were no journalists that covered/revealed ANY of Intels shenanigans at the time. The entire industry seemed to be in an Intel Vacuum.
But entusiasts all knew that Athlon was way better than P4.
EDIT2:
There was also the issue that the Intel compiler had zero optimizations for any AMD CPU, but optimized heavily for P4. That was a general thing that Intel didn't even hide.