I guess the key is that it under-performed vs last model's i7... not that it has thermal issues. I would think most laptops have some level of thermal trade offs.
I’d say that not even being able to maintain the advertised base clock is a pretty key issue. Being slower than last year’s model just adds insult to injury.
The key is that the thermal issues are so bad that it causes it to underperform against the last models i7.
My guess is Premier already had optimizations for the 2017 Macbook Pro to lessen the amount of hits to the throttle threshold temperature.