What they will say, is anything to get out of a valid RMA

Common valve W. Common Asus L.

asus are really free-falling from grace arent they

So glad I returned this after a day of use and got the steam deck oled instead

Sounds like they would need to redesign the system in some way to solve the issue, e.g. move the SD card slot away from heat generating components. Depending on the volume of sales and complexity of the work, they could have decided it would be more viable from a monetary standpoint to not do anything.