Now, I'm assuming they mean pre-computed and animated destruction, but there's a little part of me that's hoping they go Red Faction Guerrilla with it. A large-scale FPS where the battlefields can change in violent and truly unpredictable ways would be incredible.
Moldy
I just checked, you were right. Lenovo were the ones who pulled that stunt.
The W11 SE laptop I bought this week had an energy drink ad as its default background. It was a genuine shock to see how bad things were getting over there in the Microsoft world.
It's not something that's immediately obvious, but Godot's scene system is pretty much entirely optional. You can bypass it and interact with the various servers that handle rendering, navigation, physics, and other core functionality directly. They actually recommend it for performance optimisation. You could also implement your simulation using that same server architecture if you wanted to: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/development/core_and_modules/custom_godot_servers.html
My internet drops consistently enough that if I want to watch a long video, I'll preemptively download it with yt-dlp. Maybe it's worth trying that.