> Could a wave actually get that high and make it to land?

Yes. But these aren't tsunamis.

Tsunamis are as damaging as they are not because of their height but because of their length. A tsunami can have a wavelength of hundreds of kilometers, so there is a huge amount of water behind it unlike a normal wave that breaks and dissipates when it hits land, a tsunami behaves more like a rapidly rising tide (hence why they're sometimes known as "tidal waves").

Note that tsunamis triggered by landslides rather than seismic activity can be much larger. In 1958, a landslide in Lituya Bay, Alaska, triggered a megatsunami that caused damage 524m (1719ft) above the waterline. This is higher than the Empire State building. Such an event has, as far as I'm aware, never been filmed, so who knows what it would look like.

Old fashioned reciprocating steam engines died out because they're very inefficient, heavy, and they burned coal so not at all clean either.

But we still use steam power. It's just that these days, we use steam turbines, which are much more efficient at extracting energy from fuel. It's still not clean energy unless the heat source is nuclear (or sometimes solar), but modern power plants burn a lot less fuel to produce a given amount of power than the old steam engines did.

I put off learning how to do this until just last month because I thought it would be hard but it was actually really quick to learn. I followed this tutorial and it only took a few days to design my board having never done it before.