Indeed. "It's not the fact that the amp is clipping that causes failures - it's the extra power that's delivered to the speaker.". As I wrote, an amp produces much more than the rated power when clipping. Feeding a higher-powered amp some heavily compressed and distorted pop music can result in exactly the same result as driving a lower-powered amp to clipping.
Unfortunately this is a topic with lots of anecdotes and "handed down wisdom", but little actual scientific evidence.
To quote
Why Do Tweeters Blow When Amplifiers Distort?:
"A persistent myth in the audio industry is that clipping damages tweeters, so you should use a bigger amp to ensure more headroom so the amp won't clip. This claim is simply bollocks! Take the 100W amp described above, and replace with an amp big enough to prevent clipping ... even with the additional 12dB input signal as shown in Figure 7. Since a 100W amp was just below clipping with an average output of 16W, if we add 12dB that takes the peak amp power to 1.6kW (near enough) and the average power will be 254W.
Do you imagine for an instant that this amp won't blow the tweeters (and everything else) if the output level is increased by 12dB (until it's just below clipping)? Everything will fail, and usually fairly quickly if the speaker was designed for a 'nominal' 100W input. It is simply nonsense to imagine that the loudspeaker drivers in a 100W speaker can survive an average power of over 250W and peak power of up to 1.6kW.
If a user often turns their amp up to beyond clipping levels, they will probably do the same with a bigger amp. They might even turn it up
more, because it won't have the distortion component which increases apparent loudness until the average power is a great deal higher. Such users will never hear signs of speaker distress if they can't even hear gross clipping. Speaker failure is a certainty, even if their 1.6kW amp only ever clips a few transients. They can expect the tweeter to fail, and the woofer to catch on fire.
So, while it's perfectly alright to allow perhaps 3-6dB or so of headroom for the power amps, that relies on that fact that it is
reserved as headroom! If you use the extra power then there's no headroom any more, and all the effects explained will still happen, but at even higher power levels than described above."