I’ve never heard it called magic smoke before, but a regular saying at one of my old jobs was “ah yeah we let the smoke out” in relation to 100% electric drive vehicles. Smoked many inverters, shorted 96v bus to a 24v bus, etc.

It was almost a rite of passage to “let the smoke out” in that org. That job was actually great because as a software engineer I happily spent a lot of time with a fluke, a wrench, arm buried in the bowels of a vehicle fishing out sockets, etc. Writing the software was not the hardest part of those programs, but being one of the handful of folks that knew the entire electrical, cooling, mechanical, and software systems made us the most valuable folks on the program. We had to know all those things in order to write the software correctly.

In the early 80s we used to say electronics ran on magic pixie dust, and when you let the pixie dust out as smoke, the magic went away.