Indeed, Apple's recent trend of neutering the cooling on their consumer macs and "base" models is a really beginning to grate... It was bad enough when they started using 2 vs 4 ports as a differentiator, but with cooling... particularly when these are already expensive machines and there's no good reason better cooling couldn't have been included in the chassis (as its included in the upsell variant), the lack of transparency and blatent penny pinching at the expense of user experience just feels really gross. Reminds me of some of the scummier things you see PC OEMs doing
Apple Silicon is power/space efficient enough that EVERY mac deserves appropriate cooling, and its particularly egregious to see this on a desktop mac.
At least on the MBA it's an easy enough fix... just pop the back cover off and slap on some cheap thermal pads. I shudder to think of trying DIY a fix on an iMac though.
Also, I can't say the idea of an iMac that performs like my MBA is a very attractive idea... It feels like they really should've waited for an M1X/M2/etc.