This is exactly the feeling I had when I played Assassin’s Creed and picked up a flag that said “1/100”. That happened multiple times, since there are 400 flags in the game. And what do you get? Absolutely nothing but an achievement.
I hold Mario Odyssey up as a shining example of how to make large optional objectives fun. You don’t really get much of a reward for getting all 999 moons, but at least the vast majority of them have fun puzzles to solve so that it’s actually rewarding to collect them. Contrast this with, say, Korok seeds.
Usually these kinds of “can’t stop acceleration” are due to mixing up the brake and acceleration or the pedal getting stuck under a nom-OEM floor mat. I was gonna say maybe that’s the case here, but it seems pretty apparent that they were at least flooring the brakes, and I don’t imagine they switched the floor mats after 4 hours.
Also that $50k fee in the linked article is hilarious.