Cracked spoke on OEM wheel
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It looks like fatigue cracking to me. Force sufficient to crack a spoke at the hub would I'd think be sufficient to damage the tire at a minimum, and dent the rim as well as crack a spoke at a maximum. You'd know you hit something hard enough to crack the wheel casting. The casting is weak for some reason, the cracks are forming in the region with the highest stress. It's a propagating failure mechanism. Dominoes. One fails initially, increasing stress on the adjacent spokes which then also fail, transferring their stress to the remaining spokes. Each time a spoke fails, the stress on the remaining spokes increases proportionally. So the failures propagate faster as the system progresses to total failure.
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This wheel had been straightened about 4 years ago from a hard hit (I’m not talking pretzeled. Still looked round.) Perhaps it had a hidden crack that grew or perhaps the act of straightening it created stress on a spoke that took years to surface. I agree that once one spoke couldn’t support its load, the neighbors had to shoulder the burden and suffered.
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