Question about CPU temperature and usage

I'm playing on a ROG laptop with a 4090 and an i9-13980 and have noticed that my CPU temperature gets really high despite my overall CPU usage remaining low in certain situations.

For example, just running around Limsa with the usual parade of AFKers, my CPU jumped north of 90° despite my usage not getting past 25 %

I've never really paid much attention to stuff like this until recently, so this might not be new at all.

Some googling told me that this can happen when a game is coded to only use a small number of available cores, meaning those cores get hot, but since only, say, 8 out of the 16 available cores get used, the usage stat displayed can't get higher than 50%

Is this the case for FF14 as well?

Yes, that's the case with it as well - it can definitely utilize multiple cores but the utilization percentage will decrease past certain amount of cores, you can easily see this with Task Manager.

In an addition to that, the mobile Raptor Lake CPU's are allowed to consume unreasonable amount of power for some reason in many "gaming" laptops, despite the tiny heatsinks in all of such laptops. I had a misfortune of buying a Lenovo Legion laptop with 13900HX CPU in it, the CPU would quickly shoot up past 90C in most of the games I've tried, even after re-applying liquid metal compound (it came stock with my particular laptop model) to the stock vapor chamber cooler. You can decrease stock power limits (both PL2 and PL1) for this mobile CPU through programs like Intel XTU, your CPU will definitely run cooler but your performance will decrease.