Sacrosanct
Legend
A DM like Flamestrike does that with the six to eight encounter day with terrain and environment manipulation. Good for him. I'm not going to fault his method if it works the majority of the time. I'm not going to use that method myself. I want a creature so fearsome you could fight him in a white room and it would be a ridiculously tough fight. I want balors and dragons to be able to shrug off the PCs attacks and make them feel fear when it plows into the middle of a group and starts thrashing around. And 5E monsters as written do not make PC groups feel this fear meaning they don't live up to the billing, not even against regular PCs.
You keep using terms like this which seems to me to be disingenuous because these terms have negative connotations and imply the DM is somehow cheating, or otherwise not following the rules. The DM isn't manipulating the environment. The DM is using the environment like their NPCs/Monsters would use it. Additionally D&D is not assumed to be played in a white room. As i said, if you deviate from the assumed play, then it's on you as the DM to make proper adjustments. I'm not sure why you have refused to acknowledge this when it's been mentioned several times already. It's almost like you don't want to hear it so you can keep complaining about an issue that's largely self inflicted.
I'm using a different method to reach a level of creature power that fits what I believe they should be capable of. Whereas you want to narrate the ancient dragon decimating the orc army, I want to narrate this as backstory and have a dragon mechanically capable of wiping out an orc army..
It is. High level carpet bombing out of range of spells or missile weapons. Or ripping out the stone and rock on a lake to flood the valley where the orc army is camped (a dragon is not a small creature), or scorching the earth around the army, leaving them without supplies or shelter, or forcing a giant herd of animals to stampede right through the encampment, or any other number of things that a dragon is probably smart enough to figure out. These are all things that can be mechanically resolved, all you have to do is determine what chances are to hit, how many would be affected, penalties for starvation, etc, etc. If all you want is to put one stat block up against a bunch of others, then I'm not sure what the point of is that, because that's not how D&D is played. And TBH, I'm glad the designers didn't waste all their time trying to come up with a way of addressing all of that because a) that's not how most people play so it's a waste of time that they could be doing something else better with, and b) focuses on white room balance can actually be a hindrance because it fails to take in all these other factors that happen in actual game play that are significant to the outcome.