Soooo, for context I'm studying mining engineering, and starting my first playthrough of Starfield I just noticed the roadheader used to open the cave entrance and couldn't stop myself from checking if the machine is actually correctly used, so, welcome to my TED talk:
First of all we can see the machine being used is a roadheader with radial or cut picks, which as seen in the last image are used in medium to soft rocks.
I would say that it makes no sense to have the machine alone because that "tail" behind the machine is used to transport the materials that the ramp and big screws in the front grab from the front section, but since it's not extracting any material and just opening a path I can see they just leaving the ruble there for the time being.
So, now we look at the terrain itself and we can see two important things, we are extracting beryllium, a really hard material that shows up in a lot of different rocks, mostly volcanic, but also on this kind of cave, which is made out of limestone, we know that because of the obvious stalactites we see in the cave.
Can our roadheader advance through limestone with those pikes? Short answer: yes, could they cut through the Beryllium? Absolutely not, it would destroy the pikes in no time, but that's approached by making the Beryllium extraction with laser cutters and not the machine itself.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, I don't really think Bethesda had all this in mind when designing that five minutes section but it just scratched an itch for me, have a great day random internet person.