All Chromebook ports are low-voltage, you know, so it seems to take a lot of work to get that huge volume of smoke as pictured in the article's photo. Is that real or staged?

A million years ago, I learned that I could hard-reset my VIC-20 or C=64 using a bent paperclip on the User I/O port. It worked a treat, until I accidentally shorted the wrong pins. There was virtually no smoke, no fire, just a little pop, and an expensive trip to the repair shop (that's when you could get computers repaired for reasonable rates, at the same place you could purchase them!)

Surely there are circuit breakers or some kind of protection on Chromebook ports, or the cheap ones simply cannot give off much smoke before they simply malfunction?