A stronger card will not only give you better performance, but also last you longer. Apart from that, I didn't really understand your question here in the context of the builds you have provided. Here are a few observations though.
Personally, I am not a fan of Liquid Cooling due to a couple of unpleasant experiences, but that does not mean all of them are bad. The good ones are actually pretty expensive, when you compare the price to performance ratio. For eg. the Deepcool AK620 is a very good cooler at its price point, but to get similar performance from a Liquid Cooler, you will have to fetch something which is double the price or more. Thats a fact you cannot change.
Second, all Liquid Coolers are bound to fail at some point of time, the good ones will give you a solid 5yrs to 6yrs. Same is not the case for Air Coolers. I still have a First Generation i5 machine with Intel stock cooler that I fire up from time to time and the cooler still works fine for the temps I can see.
Third expensive good Liquid Coolers are actually meant for overclocking on high core count, and by high core count I mean 16 cores or higher where it can really showcase its true performance. For a 8 core 5800x you wont really need a cooler of that level. There is not much room for Overclocking on any platform these days and whatever little they offer is not worth the time and effort compared to the gain. Not to mention the expense of the high end AIOs like a Kraken, Celsius or Freezer. Also, the gain you will see compared to a good Air cooler on a low core count CPU, is not worth the price difference.
Coming to the NVME drive its better to get a SSD with DRAM cache for better performance...
"Solid State Drives with a DRAM chip boast better performance than DRAM-less SSDs. This is because DRAM is much faster than NAND Flash memory. Instead of your PC having to root around your SSD for the relevant data, your PC can go straight to the DRAM. As a result, your PC won’t have to wait very long for your SSD to retrieve the data it needs."
Not all Solid State Drives are created equal. One of the biggest differences is whether it has DRAM or DRAM-less. Check out the differences here.
www.maketecheasier.com
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That WD SSD does not have DRAM cache.
Rest of it looks ok to me for both builds.