>>96246645
>Spoiler
It's implied in ERMK that that's what has happened, and there's no original smasher anymore. Also with their resources it's pretty possible they can (and did) rewrite the engram to act more on desired emotions such as obedience, and program in some mental barriers such as inability to kill certain people.
However, the ERMK states that, similairly, how aliens in guide to the net were handled, it's all whatever, everything is not canon and the party writes the real story, so understandably a big handwave and ultimately a just figure it out bro on their part.
Pretty understandable that they dont want the game to be about le-aliens or introduce actually-you-can-survive-anything button, because the game isnt about that. And the lore? Man, this setting has nanomachine swarms that arent even plot relevant despite possible gray goo scenario that noone cares about in universe, fucking warewolfs of all things, and the corebook rules and setting (calling RED out here) do not apply to any story published by Mike after the corebook whatsoever.

Also, as >>96246659 stated, Smasher is the iteration of a party wiping monster meme, was initially envisioned as a joke on minmaxing players (despite not being minmaxed to the edge like Morghan Blackhand). Sure, the idea of Smasher grew out of this meme and is now it's own thing.