Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world-burning habits and desires need not be privileged.
This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used.
If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole thing.
The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of 90-110c.
I've been idly mining on an RTX3080 for 6 months now, and the hashrate has slowly gone down about 20% since new. I suspect the thermal pads on the memory chips are slowly cooking. I replaced them once already and restored a bit of hashrate.
Did it pay for the electricity and the card itself at the current BTC price?
But I agree with the first sentence. Lots of miner cards are undervolted because what matters is performance per watt, just like many server cpus.
The excusemaking is pernicious.
Actually, miners optimise for computation/kWh of electricity (versus computation/16ms of time for gamers), which leads to running mining GPUs at significantly lower wear and tear level (lower voltage scaling, lower clock rate, etc) than gaming GPUs.
> having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market.
Having used GPUs in general burn out is somewhat common, but it's less common for ex-miner cards than for ex-gamer cards.