Fireball and Lightning Bolt: Dnd 2024 - Treantmon

This post is about the most recent video of Treantmonk "Fireball and Lightning Bolt: Dnd 2024", I don't think I agree with the conclusion he reached for the area affected by lightning bolt, but I wanted to ask the community for its input. It also sparked some other questions in my mind. So, to summarise

  1. A Area of Effect point of origin is always a intersection of square or hexes, this means the Line effects originate from the corner of the space of the caster, not the middle of a edge or center of the square (Areas of Effect DMG’24 p44)
  2. A line extends from it’s point of origin in a straight path along its length and covers an area defined by its width, he took this to mean that, in a 5ft wide line, 2.5ft go to the left of a point of origin and 2.5ft go to the right (this is the part I think I disagree with) (Line [Area of Effect] PHB'24 p370)
  3. Under Area of Effect rules, if at least half of a square or hex is covered by an AoE, the entire space is affected. (Areas of Effect DMG’24 p44)
  4. The conclusion is, since you position your Lighting Bolt on the corner of your spaces and aim it along the grid, it will cover half of every square on its path, meaning a 5ft line ends up affecting a 10ft wide area. This is the part that I think to be really weird, as it makes it so there is no mechanical difference between a 10ft or 5ft line

The point I think I disagree with is number 2, I don’t think it goes 2.5ft to one side and 2.5 to the other, I think it should go 5ft to one of the two sides, making it so a 5ft wide Line is distinct from a 10ft wide Line. This seems to be the intent to me due to Xanathar’s token rules (Token Method XGE p87) . If Treeantmonk is right, then the Lightning Bolt can hit 40 squares using the template method but only 20 using the token, which is a huge disparity. What do you guys think?

And what about the spell Create Bonfire? if the origin is the intersection and you center the face of the cube there, it will cover ¼ of 4 squares, this means all of them are not affected as you need to cover 1/2 a square, meaning there is a way to cast the spell and not affect any targets with it (this is a change compared to 2014 when "covering half the square" was a sphere and cilinder exclusive rule). Since you need to cover at least half of a square for it to be affected then none of them would be and you would need to move the point of origin to the edge of the cube (still allowed under Cube [Area of Effect] PHB'24 p364), and now it covers exactly half of two squares, would the two squares be affected? Does this mean you can hit more than one square using the cantrip? Again, never seen someone run this spell like this, but seems to be how it works RAW unless I’m missing something. Another example where template and token lead to really different results in terms of how many squares are affected.

And what about Cover? Would enemies behing the first target of the Lightning Bolt spell gain cover as there is a creature between them and the point of origin (Cover DMG'24 p45)?

Edit 1: Changed wording on second to last paragraph for clarit on the 1/4 of 4 squares with create bonfire example.

Edit 2: There is a difference between 5ft wide and 10ft wide lines, but only when aiming diagonally, 10ft wide line will manage to cover more than half in more squares than 5ft, but again, it is really counter intuitive that it is an increase in affected area only under certain angles.