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Yes to all three. They all look pretty clearly to be the situations the clarification was meant to address
Agreed.
And a prone ooze may be difficult to describe, but it should still have its mechanical effect.
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Yeah I wouldn't call 1-3 "extremely strange". They're the common cases that the clarification talks about.
I think that before this clarification, unofficial dev advice was that fatal and deadly didn't work on crit immune because that would not be doing only normal damage. So that seems like a bit of a course change.
First of all, I was confused about how it could split if it was immune to piercing/slashing so I ran that aspect of the encounter incorrectly (since I had seen other oozes that weren't immune to piercing/slashing and the idea of the two halves creature hitting just as hard and taking up just as much space individually despite being cut in half seemed weird to me)
Slightly adjacent to your point, but note that a blob which splits once, dividing its volume in two, it should still be about 80% size, which I suppose is almost enough to reduce the area of a creature with a 4x4 space to a 3x3 space, at least assuming it retained the same general shape as at full size. Getting down to 50% size requires 3 splits, at which point I really hope somebody in the party has noticed that the tactics isn't working.
(incidentally, I too ran my first blob monster incorrectly--I missed that the black pudding was immune to P/S and so my party's archer was just unloading three new blobs per round into the room, completely oblivious to how their efforts almost guaranteed a TPK because nobody in the party had AoE).)
Still seems weird that a 20x20x20 foot ooze that literally can't be cut or pierced has its whole mass displaced 5 feet basically automatically by someone with polearm specialization.
It may be a minor distinction, but I don't think it's so much that the ooze cannot be cut as it cannot be hurt from a cut. If you factor in the Split aesthetics what I see is that any piercing or slashing attack slices too easily though the ooze, and it peels in half along that fault line without actually losing any mass, therefore raking no damage from it.
(And of course, if you picture it like that, it seems reasonable that it would be difficult to shift the mass with a P/S pole arm. This is where the GM fiat comes into play I imagine)
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That part of it I don't find that weird. It's immune to critical hits because there is no chunk of its anatomy you can hit to deal a devastating blow, the best you can do is to keep tearing pieces off of it. Despite this, they tend to have low AC because they are slow and unarmoured. In some cases it makes sense that you can line up a near-perfect strike every time, to the point where even your wild 3rd-attack swings are hitting regularly. It just so happens that no matter how perfectly you align the strike it's still a regular hit.
Now, with bonus effects keying off a crit, some are going to make more sense than others depending on what the crit-immune monster is. If you have a creature that can be pinned to a wall with an arrow, the fact that it doesn't take extra damage might have nothing to do with how easily you can land that pin.
Oozes are a bit of an outlier, but their super low AC tells you that it's not weird, it's expected for crits to land on them more often than other creatures. The fact that this doesn't hurt them is just the other half of the basic expression of what these oozes are. Since oozes are quite so particular, it makes sense that you're more often going to make a judgment call what crit effects apply. For example, if the flaming rune lights a target on fire any time the weapon strikes a target dead on, it would be more weird if it didn't do that just because the target is incredibly easy to hit.
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Oozes are probably the most common group of creatures with immunity to critical hits. So I'm going to lean towards allowing most of the things that could happen on crits, as described in the clarification. I think the extremely unusual circumstances should mostly be something that happens with more exotic creatures.
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Incorporeal creatures are protected from a lot of stuff because you can't use strength-based checks against them, like Athletics to trip/shove/grab.
Oozes have no such immunity, you can trip an ooze with Athletics. That's maybe not quite as easy as a hammer crit but they still tend to have poor Reflex. It seems a bit of a strain to say you can make them prone with trip but not with critical specialization.