It’s writing colloquially… the writer has the difficult job of describing something that’s happening inside this cabinet over time and space and other dimensions
Imposed by the game and players behavior.
Bear with us means, ‘I’m about to do a bunch of description… shore up your mental banks and prepare to reread the next bit a few times.
If you had lived through the last blackout and still lived in Texas, then absolutely yes it’s newsworthy. We want to grade our government accurately. Almost having a collapse again is a bad mark on the test score.