If "dead" things look this much alive, imagine how hard it is to determine life on other planets. Real life could look much more dull than these things :-)
Cheap QLC drives become super slow when it is starting to get fairly full and starts garbage collecting (collecting SLC writes into QLC at maybe 10MB/s). IMHO this is not good enough for an OS drive.
Very easy to reproduce: 1. Buy cheap QLC drive. 2. Fill with Steam games. 3. Delete some steam games and download new games. 4. Watch write speeds tank to zero for long periods when downloading.
It's due to garbage collecting on very slow QLC NAND. You won't see it until the drive starts to get 60%+ full. Until then, the drive pretends it is an SLC with very fast writes, but then it starts to show its true colors. Yuck.
About the Lobster language used: The first thing I do when encountering a new language is look at the memory management, since what I want to do with a piece of code is usually build and manipulate data in a safe and efficient manner, so this is central. I am happy to see Lobster seems to be trying to take a new(ish) and pragmatical approach to memory management and that there is a whole document describing it in detail (https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html) which means the language creator agrees that this is important. Also happy to see the language seems to support fast memory management in a multi threaded environment, which is absolutely not self evident in many languages.
There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.