GPU kept crashing and bluescreening unless I set the frequency way down, I thought it was a PSU issue, stopped gaming and spent like 3 days researching PSUs only to find after a driver update it's not crashing any more

Had something similar with an Nvidia once and it was infuriating. Turned out it was actually a bad batch/manufacturing defect, a month after I started having the problem forum posts started appearing about the same problem with the same SKU. Something wrong with the power distribution chips or something, where underclocking it made the crashes less frequent but didn't eliminate them.

Be glad yours was fixable without having to exchange it I guess lol, it was a VERY rage-inducing month of trying about a hundred different possible software fixes in various combinations with no real improvement. I was convinced it was a software problem because there was no documentation of the issue on the internet yet.