In case the author swings by - I think the presentation of this is really cool. The sprites bring it to life as they hurry around the screen! The way Alex bookends the walkthrough of the data is clever as well, and I felt the return to him at the end was quite evocative. Nice work!
Agreed. It's been interesting to hear how the players communicate and organise each other from a fan perspective as well - it's not something we usually have access to.
I think consistency is a big benefit. Having the infrastructure described as code means that configurations are recorded in a uniform way (as opposed to just clicking around in a web interface to spin up resources and _maybe_ documenting it, for example). You can also check this code into source control and have a handle on how changes were made over time, which can be useful if a problem occurs and you want to isolate the change that broke your setup.
I worked on a project with Trees for Cities and Ealing Council a couple of years back, which tried to visualise the importance of urban trees. Data had been gathered to estimate the monetary value provided by trees and how much it would cost to replace them. It was pretty eye-opening for me. Link if interested: https://www.ealingitree.online/.
styled-components is a module used specifically with react.js (i.e. not web components).
Theming is actually handled quite nicely[1]. Essentially, you create a JS object which represents your theme (colours, fonts, spacing etc.) and pass it to a provider component. This will then provide the theme object to any components beneath it in the component tree, so you can pull out values and use them to style your app.