Yes this absolutely can happen, it's not the fault of the game it's a fault with the video cards being designed and tested around what is commonly expected use, rather than the extremes.
Some apps can more perfectly load the GPU than others. Most games even though they might read say 99% GPU load aren't actually making efficient use of the GPU, complex sets of instructions that utilize different parts of the GPU can be inefficient if some parts of the GPU are waiting for other instructions to finish. If you more perfectly load the GPU pipeline with work then you can cause unusually high power draw and temps which can damage either the VRMs, the GPU or overload capacitors.
This happened in the past with Furmark and I believe someone at AMD a while back called this a "power virus" because it draw abnormally large amounts of power which is not typical of games. But just because things aren't typical of games doesn't mean they can't happen in the wild, which is specifically why benchmarking tools test the extremes. If I had to bet I'd say maybe its the menu doing this, if you have a simple 2D menu that has a very simple set of instructions to draw it, and its uncapped so you have thousands of frames per second then that's a good candidate for the problem. People have said it happens after you recall to a new area and that's right as the 2D loading screen pops up to load another zone. People have also complained about extremely high GPU temps in the menu and while queuing in game.
Sidenote, it's a very fun game, I've been playing the beta and love it.
