Yeah, we completely forgot that Arae's 9700X had been PBO'ed. If you look at the Passmark bench (or screenshots, now that it's been taken down) you'll see that 5.8GHz is the *only* clock speed listed, it doesn't even state what the base clock is.
An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.
OP here: Yep, it's Discord. This all happened on a Discord server for a tech youtuber, I'm not sure if they want to be "outed" but they're an 800K subscriber-ish youtube channel with a five-ish thousand member private discord. There were a bunch of people involved, but you might see Arae around in the Reddit thread, she was the one with the actual 9700X in question. None of us have met IRL and we do stay fairly anonymous, but we do chat quite regularly (I've known Arae in particular for at least six months now).
If you're looking for similar discords, I might recommend the discords for things like Bazzite, LTT, Mint, or any number of other small-tech-youtube-discords, or discords for technical video games (eg. Turing Complete, BeamNG, PCBS, Factorio). Discord has no algorithm, you have to find the content yourself!
An Intel engineer in the comments did confirm that they test some CPUs to destruction in the factory (at Intel, at least), but "...if the benchmarks leave the lab, the employee leaves the company". Also that they usually do that kind of testing on golden bin chips, not a lower-clocked bin.