If this is anything like that power connector debacle, it's actually a pretty small % of all users, they're just obviously very loud about it. (Which they should be, obv)
Manufacturing mistakes happen. The important thing is AMD is doing the right thing on the repair side for them, paying for cards to be sent back and fixed. This whole situation is a bit of a nothing burger.
In my case they aren't paying for cards to be sent back and fixed, and so far there's no concrete evidence it's a small/limited batch of cards affected.
Honestly, outside of those who actually benchmark their cards, most people would probably just live with slightly reduced performance and very noisy fans (none the wiser), so it's hard to tell how widespread the problem actually is.
there are system integrators (places like Puget Systems) who build boutique gaming rigs and workstations and those kinds of places perform additional testing to make sure everything is working as expected, and they've measured around 10% of MBA cards as having faulty coolers.
the thing with the connector problem was that nobody could reproduce it in a lab, so the rational assumption was that it was a very very rare failure case at best. NVIDIA has a lot of marketshare and the law of large numbers says that if even 0.04% of people experience a failure mode, that works out to at least a couple dozen people or whatever.
in contrast this one is easily measurable by SIs, and it very much should have been caught by QC at multiple levels - 10% is not exactly a rare failure, if you can't catch a failure rate of 1 in 10 units then you are probably are missing a bunch of other QC issues too. As Igor notes in his analysis - there actually are a lot of people who fucked up on this one.
Further, we are at the very earliest stage when MBA cards are most prominent in the market. Custom card designs (PCB and cooling) generally launch later in the lifecycle, this is a relatively large amount of the entire market of cards that have a problem. Once again, should have been obvious - if 200k cards launched and half of them are MBA (perhaps an underestimate) that means there's around 10k defective cards. Not everybody would (or will) notice the defect, and that's understandable to some degree because it's not emitting smoke and flames, but contrast maybe a couple dozen people plugging in their NVIDIA cards wrong with 10k AMD users with defective coolers here.
or perhaps a more dramatic comparison would be the recent spike in 6000-series chip failures reported by a well-known electronics repairman in germany... a relatively uncommon failure has now made up around 2/3rds of his repairs in the past month and the common factor seems to be they were all using the same driver version. the New Worlds thing was a huge scandal (despite basically tracing back to EVGA fucking up their soldering yet again) and people have perpetually murmured about "bad NVIDIA drivers causing chip failures back in the day" despite that really not being supported in any significant way, and here's actually the same thing seeming to occur on AMD 6000 series cards. again, if this was NVIDIA I can only imagine the social-media shitstorm and the murmur campaign that would be in progress right now, despite only being one repairman with a sample size of under 100 cards.
there is a major major attitude difference in the enthusiast community, people are ready to pounce at the first sign of a weakness or a problem from NVIDIA, and constantly assume the most pessimistic and nefarious possible scenarios, while downplaying AMD problems and giving them the most optimistic and altruistic benefit of the doubt at all times.
like, if this were NVIDIA, does anybody think the community's reaction to a bunch of cards seemingly failing with an usual and specific failure mode would be "now calm down and be rational, let's wait and let NVIDIA investigate and see what they say"? After the connector "scandal", after New Worlds, after POSCAP-gate, after the EVGA 1080 fires, etc?
pretty sure everyone whose card died in the last month for any reason would be coming out of the woodwork and posting on reddit, and tech media would be running breaking coverage about it, demanding statements from the manufacturer, etc.
or consider the 5700XT - if NVIDIA had shipped (what at this point appears to be) defective silicon, ignored widespread reports of crashes and blackscreening for months, and then after being called out by tech media finally released a couple halfhearted patches that didn't really fix the issue for most people, would the public have just shrugged and moved on like they did with AMD? There would be lawsuits and angry videos and widespread demands for refunds etc etc.
And they did the same thing with early Zen2 silicon which was far below advertised clocks and never really improved after the patches/etc. Later silicon was fine, just a batch of poorly-binned silicon at launch that they decided to ship anyway as higher-tier SKUs, but they never recalled it or made anyone whole. The social media community just buried it, did a bunch of "well it comes close if you just run loops of NOPs" damage control bullshit to argue that it wasn't technically false advertising. Once again everyone shrugged and moved on, later silicon got better and the people stuck with defective chips got screwed.
Everyone says AMD doesn't have mindshare but they clearly do have a massive amount of mindshare with loyalists that help them move past these sorts of issues very fluidly and without any accusations or recriminations or even controversy really. Everything is just "they're doing the best they can, practically a small family-owned business, you can't expect them to ship working products every time". The tyranny of low expectations. And that's what leads to these larger problems. The recall costs, lawsuits, and popular blowback are supposed to be the corrective mechanism for companies being sketchy as fuck or taking needless technical risks, and that has been short-circuited for AMD by popular assent.
Manufacturing mistakes happen. The important thing is AMD is doing the right thing on the repair side for them, paying for cards to be sent back and fixed. This whole situation is a bit of a nothing burger.