Then, when you compensate for that low health pool by also giving them extremely strong neutral tools, you both decrease the amount of interactions needed to win while also giving the rushdown character even stronger tools to win neutral. In that respect health doesn't actually balance anything.

Interesting thing to consider when designing rushdown characters in fighting games. Balancing rushdown by decreasing a character with high damage by lowering their health pool essentially just decreased the number of necessary interactions for both players to win the game.

The important part here is that hitboxes are not inherent to the character outside of not triggering their own hurtboxes, while hurtboxes outside of fighting games are usually tied to the character for their entire existence.

For example in Smash Bros.'s internal architecture, each attack script will generate spherical hitboxes using a variety of parameters on a bone on the model of an ID specified on the script. Each of which does different damage/knock back depending on generation parameters.

Pretty much what you described. Although depending on how much control you need over your combat systems having a "hitbox generation" system is useful for scripting complicated attacks where different hitboxes achieve different end results.

I don't think it's a Godot specific thing, but I would recommend making any character controller in any engine a state machine. If you ever want fine control over a character's movement when doing something you'll be happy to have the architecture already set up

Theyre both trigger colliders that do things related to damage if that's what youre asking. But I think the distinction between "Hurtboxes are the damage triggers acted upon by the damage system" and "Hitboxes are the damage triggers that cause action within the damage system" is useful granularity.

For example, I might give an enemy a bigger hurtbox than their visual so players never have a "that attack should have hit him!" moment, while giving them a smaller hitbox than their visual so players never have a "That attack shouldn't.habe hit me!" moment.

Because of my experience with fighting games I tend to distinguish between hit and hurtboxes on even single player games I work on because differentiating feels useful from a game feel perspective.

Fighting games tend to use them a lot because having fine control over exactly what parts of a character can be hit per frame of animation is the level of granularity needed to balance them. If you look at all these examples (that even players use) calling them all hitboxes would be confusing.