Huge exaggeration there. I tested the macca on 6.0 and it was fine. You could overheat your tyres if you consistently overloaded them, or allowed too much front scrub or rear wheelspin, but you absolutely didn't have to drive at 20% to keep them cool. I could set consistently fast enough times to belt the AI at 100% without overheating my tyres. Many people on the official forum also said they could set consistent fast times without overheating tyres, you just had to be careful and drive properly, not drive it like a bloody arcade game like you can now.
Now there's no use for the medium or hard tyres, as the soft will literally never overheat, no matter how much you try to abuse them. The tyres needed some fine tuning to get them more accurate, but they were on the right path with 6.0. I was hoping they'd take more of the tyres in the direction they were taking the GT3 tyres in, but thanks to a vocal minority, they've had this knee jerk reaction of nerfing the tyres completely so they don't react at all to misuse.