I think he's referring to internal heat, not the external temperature.
Heat damages electronics and makes them wear out quicker.
That was the way I interpreted it. Perhaps chargers with heavy use degrade in some way and become more prone to overheating. I don't think it's coincidence that the 3 slow chargers I encountered had noticeably hotter handles when I unplugged them than other chargers which were charging at the normal rate.
Those supercharger cabinets have a fair bit of electronics inside. I believe the charging circuitry is made up of several of the chargers included on the cars stacked up. It sounds like Tesla under-engineered one or more components in the superchargers and they are finding it difficult to fix the problem. It also sounds like they are seriously seeking a solution. For the time being they have their techs out in the field scrambling to repair the superchargers as fast as possible, but they are degrading too fast in at least some locations.
External air temperature is a contributing factor, but not the key factor. When the cabinets get too hot, if the air temperature is hot, the cabinets will take longer to cool down and the electronics will be subject to damaging heat longer. Newton's Law of Cooling, dT/dt.
Because a component has degraded from heavy use, even if wasn't used immediately before you charged?
Exactly.
Fine you win, but what's becoming clear is that Tesla is in over their heads and not capable of maintaining their infrastructure such that it keeps up with the rapid growth of their company and fleet
California is the test bed for their growth. I haven't seen any recent numbers on how many Teslas are registered per state, but California must have a staggeringly larger number than any other state. When I took my trip to California, I stopped at a number of superchargers and the there were only two times I didn't see another Tesla during my entire time there. That was when I stopped at Mt Shasta in the evening (about 9PM). One of the times at Atascadero, I was the only car there when I unplugged, but there were several plugged in when I got there. Most superchargers had a number of cars.
That's completely different from my experience of NW superchargers. I've only seen a couple of other Teslas total in several supercharger stops in the NW and the NW is getting a lot of new Teslas, Portland alone gets several truckooads a week.