This is another video on grass rendering but in the style of Ghost of Tsushima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4
And sometimes a graphics programmer does a handful of vector products or matrix operations and produces something that makes you go 'how the hell did you think of that?' when you look at it. Any time I see a sufficiently amazing shadertoy the odds are decent that the actual code for it is way simpler than I expect but still nothing I could've come up with.
I watched his entire process twice, have made sdf animations myself (nothing nearly as good) and it’s still all black magic.