Back in the very early 2000s a friend on mine that I thought was pretty technical heard me talking about thermal paste and he had never used any. After telling him about the benefits he was excited to get some and use it on his new PC he was building. He came in the next day sad, said it had fried and he thinks it was the paste. I asked how much he put on and his response was "umm, like icing on a cake". in my head it was even worse the the posted image.

Reminds me of this:

Oops all thermal paste!

Me when I have to use anti seize in the shop

At that point it’s just thermal paste with slight hints of computer.

Oh no, oh no no no no no.

Don't do this

“A dab’ll do ya.”

Is it odd that this is not even close to "bad" I have seen? Hell I have seen things shipped from production with this level of glorp.

if they had to put some in their mouth, they should have used mayo instead.

The bigger the gob, the better the job!

The only thing too much thermal paste does is leave a mess, but you might need thermal pads on VRMs for better contact

It's not glue lol.

Not sure I see a problem here, this all looks intended. I'm not familiar with this device though. Since the heat sink plates are so big and the screws are so far apart I'm not sure they could get away with less without potentially missing contact with a sink. It seems more like bad mechanical engineering than bad application.

I changed my GPU thermal paste 2 days ago. I guess I need to open it again and empty the rest of the tube.

Each of those chips have basically half a container on them, so I'm not sure how anyone got the idea they should use that much.

This week I lost my old processor to an excess of thermal paste - when I tried changing it for routine maintenance, the processor got stuck to the fan's thermal plate, and two pins bent and broke. Had to switch to a kinda-better-kinda-worse processor (from a 5600X to a 5700 standard) and went out of $160-ish USD