You're telling me they're wasting server resources to have the exact detail of smoke and fire coming from a grenade, ship, etc. to each player? Why? If it's for gameplay purposes, then they'll need to lock the graphical details to the same level or else the ones with lower settings will see different things than the ones with higher settings... That will never happen. Probably they'll just signal a simple "render fire" and that's done on client side without much fuss, just be within the same boundaries so you know what gets affected and what not. In this case, you can do the destruction as well. I really don't see what's complicated to have an extremely basic animation with "fall down/disappear" from a technical side. However, knowing CIG, probably even Maelstrom will get toned down to just some outposts making it a bit... meh. Same as they hyped the destruction of the ships years back, in a very natural and dynamic way, based on the type of weapon and still nothing has been done like that (giving you, basically, the ability to cut a ship in half).
The only thing that has kind of a valid reason is the gameplay, but again... it's a game set in the future, you can increase the spawning rate of the vegetation so it gets back quicker to the initial state (maybe get a job to spread seeds and remake an ecosystem

). You can't really keep an entire planed burned down as the amount of people doing it would make it probably impossible - and only on a lawless system, or else you'll attract the law enforcement which should try to keep things normal.
It gets generated automatically based on algorithms, there's nothing special to it, it just follows a set of rules, you can have an infinite number of planets - or at least No Man Sky numbers... as you'll do a NMS generation anyway.
With that said, they can do whatever. I'm just waiting to play SQ42 and perhpas a bit of SC as the whole "complete" state for SC seems to be another decade along de way.