The significant performance hit when calculating collision detection for a very large number of objects at the same time, like the falling tower in the video
no, definitely not... A sphere is the easiest thing *by far* to do collisions for.
The cool thing here is that hes doing collisions with a fractal and one sphere.
I have no idea is there any in-software way to optimize lots and lots of colliders.
Not that I know of, but maybe there is some clever bastard working on that somewhere too.
Modern physics engines do as good as they can on that front already afaik.