I didn't believe the video when I saw it yesterday because it lacked technical details in addition to being too attention grabbing.
But today I had Claude take apart the Android version of the game for me; Everything OP says is true.
There are lots of manipulations but the key one here involves what the code calls offer type ZHI_SI_TI (致死题, "lethal puzzle") or alternatively "algo_must_death".
The game generates puzzle pieces in sets of three, and has different algorithms that swap how the pieces are selected. Generators have behaviors like "random", "hard", "fill gaps" (to help player), "random but guaranteed not to kill you", etc. If a given algo fails to find a solution it passes to the next algo in an active set.
The "lethal puzzle" generator considers every possible move with a given set of three pieces, then only emits them if the number of placement possibilities is 0 (no solution, guaranteed death). This is activated in several situations, one apparently being that the app thinks your current play session is a little slow, and they want you to not get bored so they kill it early to start a new one.
What the video doesn't explain is the context. In the game, "rewarded" ads are ads you get some game reward for watching. The main reward is a revive/continue; If you get into an unwinnable state you can watch an ad to keep playing. You usually only get one revive per game but there are a bunch of server-activated properties to modify this constraint.
The policy at play here is that, if you're a high-value player, and there's a high-value ad queued for you, and you're in a play session nearing your high score, the game puts "lethal puzzle" to the top of the piece generator list to rig the game to fail, right when you're most likely to be highly engaged and watching the ad on the revive screen.
It doesn't end there though; The game remembers if the last game ended due to a hand dealt by ZHI_SI_TI, and triggers FatalPuzzleDeathCompensationTrait, which takes the edge off by letting you carry over your combo count from the previous session.
Like everything else this compensate-after-we-killled-you trait is an A/B feature controlled by the server. It's manipulations all the way down; there's like 5% actual game code and the rest is literally hundreds of remotely controlled toggles to control the game state for maximum engagement.
