I see that the leaderboard was restructured so that all old runs are a new category for collecting all the water drops, and there's a new any% category. Was a skip discovered to beat the game without them? There are no submitted any% runs or any other indication that I can find that explains the practical difference between the two categories.

yes a skip was discovered that allows you to skip essentially the entire game. Somebody submitted a run using the trick before any of the moderators knew what it was so we made old any% into all water droplets to differentiate it from the new any%. the person who submitted that run didn't have the beginning of timing in their video and had their run rejected with said reason and they haven't done another run since. linked below is a video of how to do the trick that differentiates any% from all water droplets

pardon the confusion

Thank you for the quick and helpful reply! I messed around with this trick today (just submitted a run for any% on Switch) and I am relatively certain that it is simply not possible on the PC version. The collision of the elevator platform does not seem to work the same way. The glitch of pulling up the telescope while standing under the platform and then getting pushed in a way where Woodle just starts hovering in one direction indefinitely DOES work on PC, but the problem is that the elevator does not actually push you out of bounds, and Woodle just goes off in a random direction (usually flying almost directly up at high speed; this may have uses in other areas, although I couldn't replicate it with a different elevator platform in the snow level when I tried briefly).

By the way, the Switch any% category is a TERRIBLE speedrun lol. There's literally nothing to it except the horribly glitchy and laggy boss fight. I wish that this worked on the PC version because runs of that could at least be more tolerable, but at least I got a decent deathless run on the Switch.