A friend of mine who went to film school said that the primary technique in film is that you put the camera as far away as possible and simply use the zoom to frame the shot you want. These cameras have a wide field of view and a powerful zoom allowing them to be much further away from the scene and still have it be in focus, framed and with a good resolution.
They may also be using larger cassette tapes to hold more video than your average home recording device. Afaik, they still often record to some kind of physical media for storage purposes, and these big ass cameras aren’t storing the film digitally thus they have to be big enough to hold the tape/film.