Rules as written, rules as intended.

Oh that's just bullshit. I'm gonna pretend I didn't read it

I don't get it. Can you explain?

Edit (literally 10 seconds after submitting my comment): is the problem that a literal reading of this would suggest that even if more than one creature is caught in the cone, only one takes the damage?

On a tangenty note, this is one of the reasons I find board games and TTRPGs super fun: DnD 5e has a lot of these kinds of problems (which is why there's so many sage advice clarifications), but even in more precisely written games, the interplay between Rules as Written (RAW) and Rules as Intended (RAI) is super interesting, because we have no direct way of accessing RAI. Even when the games designers chip in with clarifications, as with Sage Advice, all that does is give us more RAW to interpret. All we can do is guess at the RAI, which sometimes means actively ignoring the RAW.

It's also cool to see how that tension manifests from the game design angle. I have a couple of friends who have either made board games, or written TTRPG books. Whether you're the reader or the writer, the one constant is that words are slippery and unreliable, so there will always be a gap between RAW and RAI

Actually that's us seeing light.

Edit: specifically, the light wavelength that remains at passing through the atmosphere. We're but seeing the air still, we're just seeing the color that makes it through to us. Saying that's the air itself would be like saying you see the cities filtration system by looking at the clean water that comes from a faucet.

A better example of actually seeing air would be to freeze it, and seeing the literal frozen air.

I mean that outlook, while it's cool for your campaign, it would make raising the dead (to fight for you) pretty difficult as I thought most animate dead type spells required a dead creature to animate and wouldnt work with an object, otherwise people would just make small effigies to animate instead of summoning the dead in battle.

No I don’t want to play RAW. I just don’t want in game solutions to out of game problems. Just (and I know that this will seem extremely absurd, but hear me out!) talk to your players about it like a normal person and make it clear before you start to play.

Crawford also rules that See Invisibility doesn't remove the advantage/disadvantage on attack rolls because it doesn't say so in the spell's effect, so... Yeah, I always ignore what he says.

Ironically here, Crawford actually thinks that the text of disintegrate does in fact permit you to target a wall of force that you can't see. I don't quite understand how he thinks it says that, but it does at least confirm the intention

That one has nothing to do with Crawford far as I'm aware. It’s just plain stupid interaction of several rules. You are definitely intended to be able to just cast disintegrate on the wall.

Some rules are intended in a certain way and just handled poorly. The above case is (I personally think) one of them. Others are actually intended to work a certain way because of designing aspects (like verbal components having to be said at a normal volume) but people simply decide to ditch them anyway, because they like something else better. Both are valid, but they are different.