BAR (Beherith) extended the ROAM terrain renderer to LOAM, with the 'L' being for lazy. It now only re-tessellates the geometry required to draw the terrain whenever it thinks it is required, rather than every draw frame (as I think ROAM was doing).
Keeping the camera static and watching some terraform go up does not trigger re-tessellation. This issue was very noticeable because it is common to queue some terraform and watch it grow. With LOAM, the texture was applied but the terrain did not change at all. To workaround this I change ground detail when there is visible terraform happening. Ideally there would be a re-tessallate event lua could trigger directly. I don't recall whether normal deformation causes a re-tessallation even. If I had to guess I'd guess it doesn't, but if nobody has noticed this then there is little reason to fix it.