I always thought Minesweeper would compute the minefield dynamically as you played instead of generating a fixed map of the minefield at the beginning of the game.
There is one place where it's dynamic, which is that if your very first click is on a mine, then it'll relocate it to the upper-left corner (or the next available spot).
I once wrote a “clone”[1] and when someone here pointed out the “first click is safe” feature, I implemented it by putting the reshuffle inside a while. Never thought of the first click as being “pre game”...
There’s the possibility of painting yourself into a corner (generating an inconsistent board) if you do it on the fly. It could be done, but it’s probably just simpler to generate it at the outset and then do lookups.
edit: unless you just meant that the adjacency numbers could be generated on the fly, in which case painting yourself into a corner isn’t a concern
The fact that it doesn't can be exploited by running it in a virtual machine and using the snapshot feature to go back in time. That's how we made this Website is Down video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SNxaJlicEU