Can a single cable carry 18amps, are you sure ?
I shall have a look at work tomorrow and see what the current carrying capacity is, not sure what size the cables are, have you any idea .5mm², .75mm² ?
And why does more earthing mean larger current carrying capacity of a cable?
Honestly I don't know a huge amount about it, and its less about ACTUAL capacity and more about what its designed for.
Intel a while back caused the start of mult-rail psu's, which by and large were single rails split into multiple rails all regulated to a safety limit of 18 amps, this was dropped VERY quickly but a few psu's came out that were limited to 18amps per rail. There is a few REAL multirail psu's out there and as I understand it theres more real ones now than back then(this was around when pci-e launched iirc).
So 18amps was more the safety limit on any rail, and sometimes that rail would be saturated over a single cable and is largely the reason 18amps was dropped as a limit so quickly GPU's which really pushed 18amps over a single rail and they were getting worried about how much would end up down a single wire at any one time.I think we've tended to see better over voltage protection in psu's and probably more ability to even while allowing a single rail to go to well 94amps in some cases, prevent one cable taking far too much power down it.
More grounding, I'm sure does literally nothing, what it does do is lets gpu makers essentially add a safety check in. 8 pin pci-e plug, this psu has been designed for a higher draw on this rail and will be safer, the two grounds are just there so the graphics card can basically see its an 8 pin cable and therefore assumes its a "better" PSU.
I did know exactly what the wires in the cable were rated for but I can't remember now, they are generally standard 18awg, some use 16awg, I think its 16/22 amps for those two cables is maximum. You'd often see 16awg cable up to the first connector on a pci-e cable with two connectors on it, with less load travelling over the cable to the second connector.
Basically a 6 pin/8pin can provide an identical level of power, the 8 pin is only there so you're "generally" using a better quality psu when wanting to provide the card with that much power.
If you couldn't draw 150W(or more) off a single 6pin cable, then you'd see more than just 2 grounds more on the 8 pin.