Doesn't look like a shim to me, looks like a whole replacement retention mechanism. It's definitely treating the symptoms rather than solving the problem though: don't use heatsinks with stupidly high clamping forces in the first place. Even if they don't cause visible physical deformation of the substrate, stressing the substrate is a Bad Idea in any case. The die itself is only held to the substrate by very small solder balls (far finder than normal BGA pitches), and these can easily be fractured. The RRoD, YLoD, and many laptop GPU recalls from both AMD and Nvidia have been due to fractured solder balls between the CPU (or GPU) die and substrate.
No, the root issue is that Intel is continuing to cost down their CPU packaging while their cost continues to rise. It's BS.
The issue is that some after market coolers didn't follow Intel specifications, if you fit R rated tires to your car you can't blame the tires when they fail if you exceed 100Mph.
