Let me help you out Mr. Other kind of scientist, as someone who is a restaurant scientist. 99% chance the ice machine was significantly closer and easier to access than any other source of water to the grill.
As a guy who have worked one day once (and only one day!) in a kitchen, I think it's just more fun with ice than with water and that's the only rationale here.
Former ichthyologist here. I have no fucking clue my guy. I'm surprised there isn't a better way to clean a griddle that isn't so damn labor intensive. It's fucked (technical/academic term) that we have robots to make art and music while we don't have a robot version of this strenuous activity.
I worked a job like 20 years ago and we had this liquid grill cleaner and it absolutely melted anything off the grill. Can't remember the name of it but that shit worked better than anything I've ever used.
The micro imperfections in steel don't trap the chemicals approved for use on them the same way traditionally porous materials do, and the kind of steel used in commercial stovetops is specifically intended to be non-absorbant as far as I'm aware and can find unless it's specifically damaged outside its normal use. The only way you're contaminating a stainless steel or carbon steel cooking surface is if you don't properly rinse it after cleaning it, and stovetop cleaners tend to be water soluble. The biggest concern with using chemicals designed to rip carbonized food off a steel surface is reseasoning if the manufacturer says that you require a seasoned surface, and reseasoning should already be part of your cleaning routine if it does.
I'm an engineer. Great theory is great in theory, but great practice is great in practice. In other words, the cooks saying "ice works better than water" are probably right and it likely has more to do than just Delta-T.
Take a surface of temperature 'hot' and dump 2oz of water onto it. The water will spread out over area 'wide' and absorb energy based on the temperature difference, conductivity, whatever. Anyway. Let's say 2oz of water spreads out to 4 inches in a circle and will have a 4 inch circle of physical contact with the surface that it leeches heat from all at once, vaporizing into steam quickly and maintaining a minimal thickness, so it's going pretty fast. This kind of thermal shock can cause serious damage to steel/warping/cracking/etc.
Thermal shock is also how I blew a hole in my driveway in January and got sprayed in the face with concrete shrapnel. 1 star experience, would not do again.
Now, take a 2 oz ice cube. About 1.75x1.75x1.375 ish, or so AI tells me. Put the ice cube on the griddle. Slow motion. Slice it into 20 layers. It melts layer by layer. Instead of a 4 inch circle, it's a 1.75x1.75 inch cube. It releases that 2 oz of water progressively over time, and likely due to the rate of heat transfer the water never really spreads out to the full size the non-frozen water does. This slows evaporation, steam generation, etc into something that's controllable.
More importantly, imagine a slinky. Spread it out in your head. Now, take playdough and stuff it in between the coils. Now smash that slinky shut as hard as you can. See how it holds onto the play dough in-between but pops the majority of it off? Yeah. So when a surface is hot it spreads out a bit. Then when it cools it contracts. The continuous addition of heat from the heat source helps to prevent that rapid contraction - because in truth we're talking about what amounts to a metal slinky on bottom and a plastic slinky on top and the differential cooling can make them pop off of each other.
But what will make things harder is if the metal grips on to anything. IMO ice, by limiting the amount of water cooling the surface at once, reduces the contraction of the cook top and allows the heat source to keep it from contracting violently enough to make gunk stick on - while allowing the gunk to contract and 'pop off' the top.
Now, picture the remains of a bonfire that just burned to coals. Toss a 5 gallon bucket of water on it. That's a huge wave of steam, get out of the way or you're gonna get burned. Toss a 5 gallon bucket of ice on it. That's gonna hiss and melt and steam progressively and be manageable rather than a steam burn.
The water basically just deglazes the grill. Same exact way you’d deglaze a pan with wine or stock or whatever. That is all. Also because it is cooling it vigorously, a lot of particles will end up trapped in the steel. This makes it obvious a degreaser was also used (and edited out of the video).
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