Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.
https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/
https://www.ign.com/articles/putting-doors-in-video-games-is...
This was also confirmed by a Valve developer recently about a bug in HL2:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@TomF/115589925206309168
Also in their VR titles Valve made all doors swing in both directions because that feels more natural to players when there is no haptic feedback from not being able to push open a door.
The scale difference mentioned in gp isn't just doors though but any structure you can pass through. Many games houses with larger interiors than exteriors and video game ventilation ducts are comically large.
That's an impressive bug hunt. Same code, different behavior. I can't imagine how much time the guy spent on finding this one. And how much satisfaction once he finally nailed it.