I believe this video best demonstrates the insta-kill. The easiest method is spawning a portable truck slightly inside the button to hit it multiple times, which is usually done by throwing at the button diagonally.
Keep in mind that any future runs with too large a gap between RTA and IGT times from staying on level complete screens may be rejected. :)
Thought I would let you know that runs (usually just higher ranking runs) are retimed for accuracy due to the autosplitter not being 100% accurate.
You can use a program called Livesplit to time speedruns, it's quite useful ;)
It would be nice if you would timestamp videos where the run starts later on, I timestamped this one for you :)
You can get a height boost from the side of a truck (doesn't really have a specific agreed upon name on what to call it), strafe as you said, and late jump to gain extra distance from jumps. There are also portable truck boosts that allow you to fly across the map by throwing a portable truck at a wall, and gain tremendous amounts of speed by having the portable truck hit you. There is one other trick where you can levitate on-top of the trucks in a certain way to gain more speed, but it is a lesser used/known trick. Also yeah, I replied over a year after you posted this but ayy.. why not.
What about level 7? If you restart from checkpoint the IGT goes back to when you activated the checkpoint. So if you restart from any checkpoint the IGT does not account for the restart.