To be fair, that guy who cut the RPi merely cut off the USB ports, RJ45 jack, and the ethernet controller and maybe a couple caps. I don't think chopping off a couple of low pin count peripherals far away from the SoC and DRAM counts as "cutting the board in half"
I did say it wasn't exactly the same thing but at least with some previous *Lake Intel CPUs the gfx took up quite a lot of the die. If you are using an external GPU quite a lot of transistors could fail and you could still use the CPU, just like hacksawing off the ethernet chip.
