Quit it with this revisionist history nonsense, your second link contains where Satoshi specifically mentioned that a ZK-based version of bitcoin would be better, he just didn't know how to do it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg8637#msg8637
It seems like since I first tried the game, it's gotten really slow on my machine, which is very odd, considering that it's a desktop ryzen 9 with 16 cores and a beefy graphics card. Weirdly, it still runs fast (and is consequently much more difficult) on my laptop.
Just tried it on my son's machine, which is the same hardware as mine (but running Windows rather than Linux, both of us using Brave for browsing) and it's fast there too. On my machine, even the clock rendering is dramatically slower than real-time; I'm not sure what's going on.
I was able to manually succeed on level 8, but I have no idea how it's possible to accomplish level 9. I can't figure any way to get enough inertia or upward thrust to escape the narrow spot once I'm most of the way through it.
EDIT: and... literally on my next attempt, I made it through the narrows. It's possible.