Exactly. If you increase the capacity of a bus in a highly crowded area, the bus will still have 100% occupancy, but that doesn't mean it didn't help. The throughput increased.

Much like adding an extra lane to a highway, more people will use the highway and you'll be back to the same crawl. But technically there's more flow/capacity.

Curious that you are being downvoted for the car analogy when the bus analogy you're replying to is functionally identical.

Because it’s a slightly different argument. “More people will use the highway” is not really applicable here. The bus analogy also didn’t meant “more people will take a bus”, just that if you have bus route where 20 people on each bus stop need to wait for the next bus, if you increase capacity of buses by 10, then only 10 people will be waiting on bus stops, but you will still have 100% bus utilization.

In other words, with added lane on highways, it’s sociological mechanism, which is slightly less precise analogy.

If you run the same bus route and frequency, one day with buses that fit 50 people and have 100% utilization, and the next day with buses that fit 100 people and have 100% utilization, you transported twice as many people on the second day as on the first day

This implies that on the first day a lot of people either didn't make their trip because there was no space, or took a different mode of transport. Presumably mostly the latter. With the highway example the same is true, just that it will be mostly people not making the trip at all before the capacity improvement because they were unwilling to make the higher time commitment

The laptop fans are also trying to keep a target a temperature. If you provide external cooling, the internal fans will simply work less and the temperature will remain stable. So check the RPM of the internal fans too.

Another factor is the CPU behaviour. The CPU involved in the article is intel, but IIRC for AMD Zen4 (at least for desktop) they made them boost up to a relatively high but well within spec temperature, rather than leaving performance on the table that only tweakers will see. The better your cooling capability the more you'll get but it caused a few people to freak out a little. Aspects like that are why I reserve the noisy part of my fan curve for when temperatures are going beyond normal.

Even Intel does the same thing. Every modern CPU does this.