Sega Saturn couldn't natively do polygons so instead displayed 100's of sprites

The part from the title starts at 3:35. Sega Saturn used quads (distorted rectangular sprites) rather than triangles as the basic unit in 3D rendering.

I think that approach is not that unusual for that early era of 3D graphics. Somewhere around that time I wrote a software 3D engine for PCs that was based on a similar principle. Using rectangles allowed for some simplifications compared to triangles, but it did limit the kind of shapes you could have in your world.