> If it's something like frequency throttling, there should be a user setting to force maximums, even at the expense of battery life

Battery life is not the only concern; a device that sits in your hand or your pocket needs to carefully manage heat.

No mobile device on the market runs at the same clock speed for any length of time. They’re always scaling down the clock speed for a variety of reasons (usually battery life and thermal management). If you ran at max speed all the time, you’d have trash battery life and probably cause overheating.

Each device has a pretty unique thermal profile(tablets dissipate heat better than small phones, more metal = better profile, etc) so these things tend to get tuned on a per-device basis.

We had one device I was helping bring up where you could run the GPU full-tilt for ~60s. After that the device would reboot and fail to come up until it had cooled enough. Was a fun process characterizing that device and our workloads in 60s bursts. Couple weeks later they had it tuned in where you could run it 24/7 as the thermal limits kicked in pretty aggressively.

If you enjoy a phone that runs hot, but only for a few minutes, depending on whether an empty battery or thermal protection kicks in first, sure.

Power management and thermal budgets are a very real thing. The times where all device’s components would run at full speed are (thankfully) over for quite some time.

20 years ago PCs had multiple incredibly loud constantly running fans, that I think hardly anyone would put up with anymore (and would obviously not work for phones anyway). Today’s phones are extremely more powerful than those PCs in many ways, and yet consume a fraction of energy per time unit. Does not work without complex power management.

20 years ago, PCs had much smaller fans than they do today, and the cases usually had no separate fans of their own - the only fans you'd find would be in the power supply and on top of the CPU. And passive cooling for the CPU wasn't difficult to achieve with a big heatsink.

The industry didn't focus much on quietness, that's true.

(I used to assemble and sell custom-built PCs around 1996 to 2000.)

1.4GHz Athlons were a thing around 2000, almost 20 years ago, and had anything but "small fans" to be cooled. I used to build PCs too, and once I pretty much instantly burned up the die of one of those Athlons because I forgot to apply the heat paste.

Even with computers that could be run all passively at that time, there is just no comparison to today's smartphones, which sit in our pockets and are orders of magnitude more capable along almost every axis.