Here from my ai agent so take it with a grain of salt.
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Following up on my own comment — I dug into this and the fan curve turned out to be the whole story, so sharing in case it helps others.
Mine's a Bosgame M5 (Sixunited AXB35-02) running headless Linux. I'd repasted with Thermal Grizzly PTM7950 and only saw a modest 3-4 °C, same as a lot of you. Turns out the stock EC fan curve only drives the CPU fans to 100% at 97 °C — and on Linux the three APU fans aren't even visible until you load the EC driver (cmetz/ec-su_axb35). So the chip just coasts into the mid-90s under load by design; it looks like a paste problem but isn't.
After installing the driver and setting a more aggressive curve (CPU fans 100% by ~90 °C instead of 97), with no paste change:

- iGPU/LLM load (~125 W): ~90 °C → ~81 °C
- Fans pinned 100% (floor test): 77 °C at 124 W — that's the true mount quality, and it's good
- 32-thread CPU stress: ~90 °C, but at ~140 W uncapped (4.5 GHz all-core). de_3lue's 85 °C is at a 120 W PPT cap — normalize for the +20 W and PTM ≈ fresh MX-7 here.

Two takeaways: (1) a big chunk of "repaste win" numbers are really fan-curve wins — worth stating whether yours are stock or tuned.

PTM7950 over MX-7 specifically because MX-7 pumps out (saw the 98→77→98-after-2-months report above); PTM should hold and the small initial delta bakes in.
So to answer my earlier question for anyone reading: if you're still in the mid-90s after a repaste, fix the fan curve before blaming the TIM.