Nope, smoothbore muskets were/are much more accurate than most people think, here’s a video of someone shooting at targets with one, and they were able to hit a man-sized target out to 150m. By modern standards it isn’t great but definitely not “flying all kinds of directions”.

The Youtuber Brandon F has a 4 part series talking about why they fought like this. Spoiler- it wasn’t because they were stupid.

Part 1

TLDR- if you split up you just get run down by enemy cavalry.

Part 2

TLDR- a close formation lets you concentrate your firepower at one point.

Part 3

TLDR- a close formation makes communication and controlling the army much much easier (or even possible at all).

Part 4

TLDR- the formation makes the troops less likely to run away.

Aww that’s a shame, the real Neptune looks really dull.

They’re not contradictory. All other headsets’ passthrough is just so bad that even though the Apple headset isn’t good it’s still way ahead of them.