Surely this is intended behaviour; seems perfectly sensible. Belts are only removed when they are in a straight line with no other interactions. This is great because it means you can just drag belts around willy-nilly without breaking already existing spaghetti.

If I see a potential fix in a future changelog I'll report back.

Here you go.

I was wrong, though. It's actually Metal 1. I must have been hallucinating last time I checked cause I could have sworn it said Metal 2. Sorry about that. Either way, if it should work on any version that shouldn't matter.

But it probably does.

The reality is that this computer is ...

What did you do?
I switched to the Metal backend and restarted the game.

What happens?
The screen goes completely black on startup except for the system cursor. Steam FPS counter also doesn't show. The startup jingle plays, and after nominal loading time (or possibly a bit quicker than usual ...