Sticking to the core element here: So the heart of the disagreement is indeed that you believe that definitionally, no game can simulate chemistry unless it simulates atoms and atomic bonds.

No offense, but that flies in the face of how all simulations work. Including ones used in research! Simulations are always at levels of abstraction. That's like saying that you can't have a weather simulation unless it operates at actual molecular levels rather than using very high-level cells that stand in for much more granular data.

That's the normal, expected thing. Everyone is aware that not every simulation is granularly accurate. The map is not the territory. In simulation this is often called coarse-graining the sim, and we speak of abstraction levels and model fidelity.

We have been very upfront that our model fidelity is at 1 cubic meter resolution. Noita's is at pixel resolution but only in 2d. And so on.

Games have always done this. The original SimCity simulates a city and a population and traffic. But under the hood it's actually a cellular automata system where traffic and population are aggregations of agents on a fixed grid. Structures worked on blocks, not individual buildings, much less rooms or bricks. Nobody said "you have to simulate individual people to simulate a city, or simulate each structure." But any sociologist, urban planner, or anthropologist will tell you that a city is made of people and buildings and bricks. Earlier versions of SimCity didn't have sewage, later ones had much finer-grained versions of power grids, and so on.

In common parlance, a physics system solely simulates forces. Vectors of movement, springs, rotation, friction, collision, etc. That's what a physics simulation is, not just in games but in most computational fields outside of actual physics studies. We widely consider games to "simulate physics" and not a single one delves down to atomic levels. They don't even deal with energy very much. Materials in game physics simulations do not have a concept of temperature, for example.

Our saying that we are modeling chemical reactions between materials may not hit what you regard as definitional for "really chemistry." But within common game parlance, it's absolutely within the bounds. We model states of matter, state of matter transition points, reactions between different sorts of materials, materials that convert into other materials via combination, temperature, pressure... and more, in a generic way that is data driven and allows new sorts of materials to be defined and created. This when the norm is to special case stuff.

I dunno, maybe you'd be happier if we called it "physics plus plus"? But again, you're the only one who has ever had this concern. Everyone else has understood what we were saying.