Ah, my mistake, you’re right. That example is using a different coding approach because it’s running on three.js r55, and InstancedBufferGeometry wasn’t added until r72, I think?. However, the concept of instancing and animating all the geometries on the GPU instead of creating 50k meshes is still the same.
Also, you mentioned 6 triangles per hexagon, but here’s a little trick to draw one with only 4 tris, if you want to build it manually:
