The heat is critical, especially as the edge gets thin because it then has no ability to heat sink and the temperature rises very easily, if you couple this with water quenching then you can easily end up with a very fragile edge, much more so than the thickness itself would dictate. A number of makers have spoken out about this, Roman Landes for one, and fortunately it is becoming more commonly advocated, especially with the ease of fluid cooling systems available. But still there are people who believe things like :
-if you don't change the color you didn't damage the steel
-if your fingers don't burn you didn't damage the steel
neither of which are true, and both of which ignore basic physics.
There is quite a bit of discussion about very thin edges and use on the forum, even chopping blades are being made in the 0.010"-0.015" range and user edges are commonly < 0.005", but again you really need to be wet grinding in that range and they are cutting tools first. The limit of that grind is made by Herder as those German knives are essentially zero ground with a micro-bevel, anyone who is interested in cutting performance needs one of those as a reference if for nothing else.
There are a lot of custom makers doing some very extreme things as well, Kyley Harris for example has a utility blade that has the spine at a thickness that most people consider thin if it was on the edge of a high performance knife :
[video=youtube;ZpW8qdSZNpc]
https://youtu.be/ZpW8qdSZNpc[/video]
Again it is just a matter of finding the balance of durability vs cutting ability that suits your needs/desires.