Miss 4e D&D

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To an extent, though, this is how folks do combat... you use the combat rules, but you also recognize when something needs to pre-empt the mechanics as written. If the wizard Disintegrates the dragon, then it's 5d10+Intelligence damage, ongoing 10. What if they Disintegrate the keystone of the ceiling? The building collapsing is going to take things out of combat and into another kind of challenge entirely.

I'm not sure I agree with this. In a game like 3e and 5e, disintgrate will tell you exactly how much material is disintegrated by the spell, and 3e will even tell you how much damage broken pieces of ceiling deal if/when they begin to crumble. In both editions, the expectation is that you can still run everything with the same resolution system. 4e is the only edition here where the game gets segmented out into its various buckets of Combat, Skill Challenge, & Everything Else.

2) scaffolding like this is a useful tool to help people figure out how to run non-combat challenges without having to go through decades of experience.

If the scaffolding is what's valuable (and it sounds like it is, since the useful stuff here seems to ignore the SC's straightjacket rules, like Advantages, mandatory initiative, etc), then I'm not sure it's useful to call these Skill Challenges anymore. Personally, I'd rather have new DMs learn the scaffolding from a game that doesn't include all that extra baggage, like Blades in the Dark or Fate.