I'll be frank ("Hi, I'm Frank...") here and say that I would be absolutely shocked if Nvidia goes with a 2-slot design on the RTX 5090 Founders Edition. I have all the various Founders Editions from the past decade or so, and a lot of those can get pretty freaking toasty. You know what two of the worst offenders are?
RTX 3080 10GB and RTX 3080 Ti. Both dual-slot cards, and still with 320W and 350W TGP, respectively. (Titan RTX and 2080 Ti are also super hot, with surface temps of well over 70C while gaming unless you have a separate large fan blowing at them.)
It's not impossible to cool more power and heat than that in a dual-slot design, but mostly that will require a lot more airflow and materials that dissipate heat better. And the real kicker is that there's no indication the market as a whole is particularly worried about the use of 3-slot and even larger top-end graphics cards.
We still don't know specs, but if the consumer Blackwell stuff sticks with TSMC 4NP (like B200 AI/datacenter), it would require a massive reduction in power consumption to keep a dual-slot card in check. Or wind tunnel fans would also do the trick. Even with exotic materials, removing 450W from a dual-slot volume will be very difficult.
I think there will absolutely be dual-slot Founders Edition cards, of course. They just won't be for the 5090. A 5080 in dual-slot trim? Yeah, that's possible, especially if current rumors of 256-bit memory interface compared to 512-bit on the 5090 end up true.
Let me take it a step further: I will be very disappointed in Nvidia if it takes a step back and uses dual-slot on 5080 or 5090. Again, I've got the old 2080, 3080, 4080 cards. The 4080 shines in comparison to the previous generations, thanks in no small part to its use of the 4090 cooling solution. Or perhaps I'll be super impressed and Nvidia will make a dual-slot 350W or higher power draw card that doesn't burn my fingers if I touch it while running games. Past history suggests that won't happen, though.