I'm going to express some solidarity with OP here. I feel like there is some unconscious bias affecting their visualisation, in no small part due to my first blush reaction being "that kinda makes sense". On Earth at sea level we are used to ice being rigid enough that we don't expect tidal forces to distort it at the same rate as it affects neighbouring water, however as OP pointed out tidal forces in the Jovian system are colossal compared to what we are familiar with.
We also expect our atmosphere to rush in to fill any available space, even though that's only true at surface level (give or take a few meters) its counter intuitive to think about different paradigms of atmosphere if you haven't trained those reflexes.
Its kinda like the hottest parts of he Earths core being hotter than a large amount of the surface of he sun. That boggles my mind, but once I understood the caveats of that statement and the science involved it made a lot more sense, even if it wasn't intuitive.
