While its nice when a program let’s you pick the egress interface for its network traffic, split tunneling is still on the host os for handling its route table and making sure that’s set up correctly. Like, were people setting up split tunnel networks where they were treating the vpn interface as a proxy, pointing the software at it, and just hoping for the best?
That far out, the golf course was probably on an independent grey-water system and not the main grid. Probably had tankers pulling it straight from the wells and driving it to the site of the fire.