I agree with you that a properly designed CPU shouldn't instantly fry for lack of cooling but is water cooling really worth it? As far as I can tell outside of very esoteric special-purpose equipment it seem very uncommon in the professional world and seems mostly popular with g4m3rs looking to impress their peers with their $10k gaming PC builds.

In my experience air cooling with a sufficiently large heatsink is simple and very reliable. Water cooling is more expensive, trickier and can fail catastrophically.