For color contour images, you have to be mindful of the gradient of the colors and what it means.
In the M1 MBA versus M2 MBA IR image, the white color on the M2 MBA is about 100 °F. So, a medium load, but the peak temperature in the image is white at 100 °F. That less intense white area, or orange, on the M1 MBA is about 92 °F. What creates the concentration of white is what temperature is considered white, and what colors represent cooler temperatures. It's a color contour. Since the M1 MBA is running a little cooler, it has less color to create a concentration. Your brain sucks at differentiating subtly different hues of color. So, it's bit of an optical illusion.
Notebookcheck has this IR image of the M1 MBA running a stress load:
The M1 MBA is rotate 180° from the image you have, but in this image, the white is the peak temperature at 117 °F, with ambient blue or black being 72 °F. A lot more color spread between the cooler parts of the laptop, 91 °F on the upper left and right corners of the image being purple, and the white in the peak in this image. And, the heat concentration is easier to see, which is where you expect it to be, the SoC location.
You really have to be careful watching videos. Videos are narrating from a script and the audio narration can have nothing to do with the video. Like the iFixit video. The audio is read from a script, perhaps while even watching the video clips, and if not, the synching can be changed later. They need to find a piece of video to match the script or change the narration. So, it often happens that what is said doesn't match what is on the video or vice versa, like the real clip can't be used, for instance, because it was a bad camera day, but this other bit of video looks great but it's not the situation being discussed in the script, but close enough and details don't matter, etc. The pan from the IR camera in your video link could be like this. It was good enough for the words in the narration, but may not reflect the details of the narration. So visuals in videos are often illustrations, not the precise real deal.
For the Mac Studio video, you are beset by a color contour problem and you think the heat from the SoC is going to conduct through about 3 to 4 inches of stuff: big radiator fins, insulation, shielding. The color contours in the image are set by the Intel and M1 Mac mini (?) machines in the IR image (you cropped it right?). White color was about 125 °F in the image and it was basically the temperature of the air from the Intel Mac mini as you can see it heating up the table surface next to it.
The job of the fan based cooler is to remove heat through convection. It's moving on order 10x, more (?), air through the box. So heat from the SoC is being distributed across a much large surface area, it's a pretty large heat sink, and a larger volume of air. The heat from the SoC isn't going to be conducting through that enough to generate a heat spot on the upper surface of the Mac Studio, and what heat is there in the image is really from the back half of the radiator fins of the heat sink.
If an IR image of was taken from the bottom of the Mac Studio, then yes, there is likely a heat transfer path to the bottom that will show were the SoC is. For the laptop IR images, there is a huge benefit of the laptop essentially being a flat plat, so heat concentrations are easy to see from broadside angles. Looking at a chunky box like the Mac Studio at the angle in the video, doubtful.
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