Pretty much any computer can be destroyed by SW or firmware (which is also just SW, BTW). Any laptop or smartphone has a PMIC that can produce out of range volt

Pretty much any computer can be destroyed by SW or firmware (which is also just SW, BTW). Any laptop or smartphone has a PMIC that can produce out of range voltages, thermal protection can often be worked around or disabled, battery can be overcharged or overstressed, etc. etc. With USB-PD, you can just configure the HW wrongly and let the USB PSU send you 15V when you can only handle 5V, which will surely brick something. There are way too many ways to brick the HW. Lot of these highly dangerous things are controlled over I2C or SPI buses, which don't use any checksum mechanisms, so SoC can send "set CPU core voltage to 1.1V" and PMIC can plausibly read "set CPU core voltage to 1.8V" due to noise on the data line, or what not, and just do it. It's kind of interesting that failures don't happen more often.