Pads on low thermal loads like VRMs and VRAM are absolutely fine. Often they are also entirely necessary, as coolers are engineered to contact the GPU die first and best, with the tolerances for everything else being much looser. Anything else, like the cooler hitting the VRAM before it properly contacted the die, could lead to catastrophic results after all. So pads are used to fill the gaps inevitably left between these secondary/tertiary heat sources and the cold plate, as paste simply can't build up very thick in a stable way. And engineering a cooler with paste-thin tolerances for all available components is essentially impossible due to manufacturing variance.
If the included pads are thin, as long as they are making proper contact (remove the cooler after mounting and check for dents/marks), that is ideal. Thicker pads = more thermal resistance, so thinner pads are always better. That's also a large part of why paste performs better than pads - you can never squeeze a pad as thin as you can a paste. Ideal thermal paste thickness in situ is in the range of a few micron, after all. The less interface material there's room for between the heat source and cooler, the better.
VRMs also produce so little heat as to make the quality of the thermal pads pretty meaningless (unless they are deteriorating, far too thick, or you are pushing the VRM very hard). I've used the inlcuded thermal pads on my EK water block since I installed it in 2016, including removing and reapplying them during a complete block teardown and cleaning, and they work perfectly still. IIRC I first installed that using GC-Extreme on the die+HBM (which needs paste and is the same height as the die, being on the same package), and that was still working perfectly when I tore it down in late 2020 - I just wanted to check and clean the internals of the waterblock - if I could have done that and re-used the paste I would have.
