It was definitely annoying and if you didn’t have a screwdriver to get inside it was “bricked.”
The one thing I was never brave enough to do was overclock. Supposedly it was just unsoldering a capacitor which would do something like 3x the clock speed.
My misconception came from an article I read at some point which described assembly/C (I think) programming as more risky, and I just took it at face value.