BlackMagic's Decklink Cards need Aux PCIe Power
Higher bandwidth multi-nvme boards can need Aux PCIe Power
Plenty of USB expansion cards (including, soon, USB4 cards) to add more ports need auxiliary power if you want them to supply full power from their ports
And that's not getting into rarer or more esoteric or proprietary workflows with custom cards. Or future proofing for further need.
Worth noting also that even forgetting about the extra 6 and 8 pin connections around each PCIe slot provides up to 75w, and a lot of cards that dont need aux power do eat that (including a lot of DSP cards). 7x75=525w that *needs* to be budgeted just for the slots alone. The machine also has more has twice as many thunderbolt ports, which also need to be powered, etc.
*And* we dont have a full number on how much wattage the SoC can actually burn at full utilization, it's a good bet it'll be able to run at higher clocks longer than a studio, and probably have a higher TDP as a result.
And what DSP boards are you looking at? Avid's HDX doesnt just have a heatsink, it has a fan, as an example.... Raid controllers and higher speed, dense, NICs, can also draw a fair percentage of a slot's allocated power and need heatsinks as other common things to stick in a mac pro
Rackmount doesnt need the lattice, but neither does the tower, it does need decent airflow. I've spent plenty of my life racking and stacking. I don't do much anymore but I can tell you a dense rack runs hot and somehow I don't think that's changed (and yes, the Mac Pro is *not* a dense machine on a rack, but it will often be mounted in places with denser compute, or in media racks for video/audio work with cruddy airflow)
tldr just because *you* don't need the power for anything other than GOUs doesnt mean a large chunk of the target market doesnt.
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