I read [1], but I still don't quite know what I'm looking at. My guess is a 3D model reconstructed from lots of detailed pictures?
There is no mesh or model. The visual surface of the strawberry could be made up of blobs spaced far apart physically and not where the surface appears to be.
This is why they are called radiance fields, they model the light not the geometry.
Practically the blobs positions/rotations can be constrained to better physically match the geometry of a strawberry.
Otherwise the splat would fall apart as soon as the viewing angle is changed slightly (Which it absolutely does in many examples on supersplat, you cannot really create an out of distribution view with 3GS, it's not magic)
It has a mean, and that mean doesn’t have to lie on the surface, consider the case where the mean is deep inside the strawberry but its spike contributes to the surface appearance (e.g a seed could be represented this way, or it could be represented by a small well-oriented blob on the surface, the optimiser doesn’t care)
I took maybe 10 pictures of a model I built and threw it at my 3060 during dinner and it came out quite nice.