This is true, most of the time can flash it if you have a spare GPU or iGPU. It is possible for it to completely brick the card with no chance of a reflash though. Voiding your warranty isn't worth a power limit increase IMO.
The article may have mentioned the capability of a 5700 to be flashed but it doesn't include this in testing. I do believe that flashing a 5700 is more notable though as it's a direct performance increase whereas a with a 2060 you are only looking at increasing power limit. Not that I would recommend doing either unless you are willing to buy another.
1.
https://www.techspot.com/article/1793-metro-exodus-ray-tracing-benchmark/
At 1080p in Metro Exodus, even the 2080 Ti struggles. Average of 72.5 and 1% lows of 45. These 1% lows indiciate a large variation in frame rate. The 2070 dips below 30 FPS at 1080p 1% lows. That's not good. In fact I would much rather have a lower average but higher 1% lows. Consistency is key when gaming, not having it leads to a very unpleasant gaming experience.
While low FPS might be acceptable to some, the overall PC market has been trending towards high refresh rate monitors for a long time. The experience is objectively better. Time between refreshes is cut in half or more. How many people do you see saying that 60 FPS is superior to 144 Hz or 240 Hz? Maybe a handful. On the flipside, far far more would happily admit 144 Hz or 240 Hz is a big upgrade. It's less subjective and more "60 Hz is good enough for some people but for the majority of people it's a big upgrade". I know that I am never going back to a 60 Hz monitor. Even just browsing the desktop if feels much more responsive.
Here is also a TechSpot revist of BFV RT performance after Nvidia did some tweaking
After a less than encouraging debut of real-time ray tracing in Battlefield V, Nvidia and DICE have been working together to optimize the game's implementation of DXR....
www.techspot.com
Around 60 FPS on low. Not impressive nor was BFV's RTX implementation very good, requiring a patch just to get decent performance. GamersNexus did a breakdown of it and found significant noise introduced. After all, with the low amount of sample Nvidia is taking, they have to use an AI powered denoiser to clean the RT up.
2. Navi had some launch bugs and indeed have been noted. The severity of which though has not exceeded Nvdia's own transgressions. If you personally feel AMD's drivers are buggy then you also have to agree that Nvidia also has buggy drivers. Joker for example, did a video just last week about a buggy Nvidia driver that was released the day of the video. The only difference between AMD's buggy drivers and Nvidia's is that Nvidia screws up at seemingly random times and very rarely on launch. On the flipside, AMD frequently has buggy drivers at launch and improves on them from there. I really wish AMD would launch a card that doesn't have buggy drivers and I also wish Nvdia also wouldn't put out the occasional driver that causes random issues like fans to stop or bricks windows
3. I don't see why they wouldn't ban you for using Nvidia's sharpening if they were going to ban you for using something like ReShade. They both provide a competitive advantage. If the goal of their rules is to ensure an even playing field, this is the logical conclusion.
4. Yep, that's my bad. I was under the impression that all 16xx cards used the old NVEC. It turns out that only the 1650 uses the old encoder.