Yeah, it stems from a Roman punishment where they would execute one out of every 10 soldiers to discipline a legion (i.e. for mutiny or desertion). Pretty wild stuff that obviously doesn't have a lot of uses in modern parlance so it makes sense it morphed into another synonym for "destroyed."

Yeah, it comes up a lot in games writing and I always quietly correct it to "devastated" or something synonymous with what the author meant to convey because it's a personal pet peeve, but nobody actually cares except a few of us weirdos.

"Decimated" falls into the same technically-incorrect-but-also-nobody-uses-it-the-right-way classics category.

Birthday king.

This has been bothering me for six months now and I think about it every time the game comes up in conversation.

San Francisco is the same. So far, our current mayor's One Big Idea was "station cops at a single intersection 24/7 for six months" and they finally ended that recently because it cost tons of money and...did effectively nothing. It (predictably) just pushed everyone to the surrounding streets.