Two questions for Berco as I’m experiencing the same symptoms but on a late 2014 MBP.
# My MBP works fine when it’s plugged into the external thunderbolt display, but shuts off after 3-5 minutes when it isn’t. I tried just putting a dummy thunderbolt dongle in the port, but that didn’t do anything. What kind of dummy dongle to you have in the port to keep it from crashing?
# Your suggested work around of turning off thunderbolt chip/port via Terminal, won’t that deactivate my thunderbolt ports so I won’t be able to use my external display?
Thanks.