I'm on my third festool 55 plungecutsaw, first one was an ATF55 which is about 20 years old now I'm guessing, and it still works, the second one was a TS55 which got stolen, and the most recent is a TS55R ebq. The atf has a led-light that lights up green during normal use, and turns red when the load is too heavy.
On all of them the thermal protection worked fine. But in the past I just let the saw rest when it shut itself off, but this never worked well, and most of those times, the saws would shut off completely and would only work again the next day.
I also have a Carat brand wallsaw, which has to be used with an isolation transformer, which also has thermal protection (The isolation transformer is used because it can be used with watercooling for the diamantblade) I noticed in the past that running the saw with no load to cool it down worked fairly well.
When I tried it not so long ago with the ts55r I found it worked extremely well, and it didn't take long to cool down at all, and it would keep cutting fairly long before it would kick in again.
The last time the thermal protection kicked in before the floor removal job, was when the toe-in setting on the saw had been knocked out of allignment caused by drop. When in normal use, cutting mdf or plywood, or cutting down doors I haven't had a problem with the saw overheating.