Couldn’t have said it better. Really.
For quite a while into it, even after the launch, I was thinking “this is a very good CGI simulation.”
Then I noticed the vapor (or smoke) burning off the coating on the landing support struts as they absorbed infrared radiation from the exhaust plume. In the dead-calm air at 250 meters, the vapor cloud hardly moved. At that point, I was thinking “no computer graphics guy would have thought to include that effect, no matter how good his imagination.”