Guessing the holes are too small and deep to be pellets, and there wasn't a recorded machine that fired multiple bolts simultaneously.

Came to the comments with the same question as you. I'm pretty sure the answer is that it almost certainly was a bunch of small projectiles hurled simultaneously, but that wouldn't be interesting enough to even write an article about.

I'm pretty sure this isn't even written by a human, it's deliberately inaccurate infotainment LLM slop.