I’ve done this with my TV’s display board because it can actually handle the oven temperature, but yeah it’s a bad idea for most things. It’s fixed it twice so far, but I know it’s just delaying the inevitable.
Did similar thing with turning on and wrapping a red ringed xbox 360 upside down in a big heavy blanket.
My instinct to mock him for this is staid by my admiration for his willingness to publicly admit to doing something so ill-advised as a warning to others.
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The xbox one seems really crummy compared to most.
I did it. Twice.
I had a Macbook from about 2012. This was when they first changed to non-lead solder and this had problems. I had got a reasonable backup. The machine was useless in its current state, so I would lose nothing. I had a fan oven. I am a materials scientist, and the videos I saw seemed plausible. I took out the motherboard, and stripped off everything I could. You don’t have to melt solder to anneal it. This got me several hours of a working machine, which let me get more stuff off onto a USB drive.
There were plastic plugs I could not remove. These get brittle. But when it went wrong again, I popped it back for another go. It worked for longer this time because I had an improvised cooling system. Yep, I only got a couple of days more, but in my case it was enough.
I also had a heat gun. This was less controllable than the oven - it could melt one bit while other bits stayed cold. I did not know where the problem was, so the oven seemed safer.
So, IMHO, the web is not just people trying to get you to pop your phone in the microwave, though there are plenty of those too. There is a logic to this. It can work for certain values of ‘work’.
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Even then popping your mobo into an oven wasn’t a great idea (neither was the “towel trick”)
Hy beloved 17" had the same problem. There is a fix that works!! The solution is to disable the graphics card and use the internal Intel graphics. Part of it is software, but you need to remove a resistor from the motherboard to make the software fix permanent (otherwise it keeps trying to re-activate the graphics card). Sure, you lose video performance, but it works reliably and boot times are much faster. If you can’t find the info, let me know.
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I did try disabling the separate graphics in the system settings (there’s a ton of troubleshooting I didn’t include because it’d bore you all) and this did improve performance, but the degeneration persisted. I even did some hardware fixes (I know a bit of electronics, enough to get myself in trouble) and that helped too, but all my fixes only prolonged the inevitable death of the machine. Eventually I gave the old 17" machine away, but I’d recommend posting the info in case others might be in similar straits and benefit from knowing the fix.
I recall the “the finger drop” method of un-sticking hard drive mechanisms. And the “Quantum shuffle” method.
Sometimes “percussive maintenance” does help.
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Ahh, yes I, too, have tapped a few hard drives with a hammer ever so gently to unstick the heads. I also shorted over a current sense resistor back in the day of full sized 5.25" drives for a nice old drive that was just taking a little too much current to spin up than the electronics wanted to give. Safety feature, smaftey feature. It was a 30MB drive, I wasn’t going to give up easily!
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Good idea about helping others - when I searched for the links again from my revived computer, I couldn’t find them easily. I had to go to my other computer that I had used while fixing the broken one, because… 
Here’s a good overview article with pictures. They reference this website, which has all the gory details. Basically, there is a software mod to disable power to the GPU when it boots - this involves booting linux to change that setting. But, if the computer boots in non-safe mode, it will re-identify the GPU and undo that setting. So, there’s a hardware mod to disable the power supply to it - it’ll be like its unplugged. It’s been working like a charm for 5 months so far. One limitation is that it can’t use the latest OS because it talks to the backlight in a different way that doesn’t work with this mod. But, luckily, I had an older OS installed.
That myth has me eyerolling and (if IRL) often eyeballing the people perpetuating it.
I sometimes start to scream internally. Rarely out loud, but it happened, too.
Cue in someone who joins in with “worked for me”, or worse. See above in case of half-baked Macs.
I have a dessication chamber with a bunch of sillica gel in it for such uses, but that’s normally after I’ve removed the PCB and washed it in IPA then acetone.
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You are a pro, obviously.
Phone toilet drops much?
On a serious note, silica isn’t hard to come by. And usually sufficient. Rice is just bullshit.
Family who are hard on phones and don’t seem to understand that snow becomes water when it melts.
“Well it was fine for a while afterwards…” Yeah, until the ion migration of the metal in the balls corroded the hell out of the PCB and now it’s acting like a resistor instead of an insulator. And it’s not like I can get a brush under a BGA to scrub that off. And anything I could use chemically to clean it will only make things worse.
Sorry, family, you need to be more careful or buy more new phones.
Edtied to add: I didn’t always use sillica gel. I used to use calcium chloride. I think that’s what it was. It’s the stuff they sell to keep closets dry, etc. It’s now well labeled as to what it is, but it looks like calcium chloride and it was cheap. But it’s messy as the hydrate form is a liquid.
To be fair they spent weeks trying to figure out how to involve a Twisty Glass Blunt in the macbook repair, but finally gave up.
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What if I bake it in sourdough?
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