The issue gets worse with time not better even on AIB cards the pads they are using aren't good enough.
Or there is contact being created thanks to the GPU flexing with sag especially on the bigger heavier AIB cards.
Having to do mods isn't ideal and they are under warranty.
I think I would rather let it be. Then sell the card in 2-3 years as warranty is about to run out and get the 40 series. If it does fail you can always send back under warranty and likley get a 40 series for free anyway.
Modding makes zero sense. If the ram is getting hot you can always underclock the ram. The ram makes zero difference to fps anyway. It's the core when gaming. A -200 underclock will see less than 1% dip in performance which can be negated by a +50 core overclock. Undervolt the core and you will have better than stock performance and cool ram with the underclock on the ram.
I am going to leave it be I think unless it gets significantly worse. I would have been much more annoyed if I had paid well over MSRP and I'm very happy with the performance, the card is pretty quiet at 100C memory temp and below too.
The other thing I noticed during the extreme heatwave (temp was over 30C in my room) we had a couple of months ago is that the FE cooler massively heats up components around it such as the chipset on my X570 Aorus Master (the junction temp was getting to 84C on my old case fan profile during that heatwave) and the PCIE slots leading to PCI/Bus Interconnect WHEA corrected errors. I had to use a more aggressive case fan profile to keep things cool and that got rid of the errors (which I'm still using). My old Palit GTX 1080 would cool down the chipset under load.
My case is set up for positive pressure with 3 Noctua intake fans in the front and one in the back and an NH-D15 S cooler with two fans on the CPU. Maybe I need more exhaust but whenever I've added fans in the past it's made no difference
The strange thing is Gamers Nexus found that their FE didn't heat up components which is the opposite to what I found but they were running their case fans at maximum speed if I remember correctly.