Hey, I'm a little late to this, but you aren't stuck. The puddle has paint, neutral, and thinner states depending on how much of the surrounding scenary is painted or not. You'll want to thin out some of the cacti but not everything. When the puddle is neutral/translucent/white instead of blue paint, you can thin the bottom tower supports to safely reach the battery. If the puddle ever turns into thinner, you have to paint some of the scenery/cacti back in until its neutral. Hope this helps :)

I actually did try thinning, repainting the cacti and the base of the tower for about 2 hours. What happened was:

The puddle would turn colour from neutral to thinner, yes.
But the base of the tower couldn't be thinned out for whatever reasons on that save run.

I ended up restarting the game from the beginning and I had no issue with that mechanic whatsoever in the second run.

But.. Since I took precaution because it may get bugged again, I made a back up save after reaching the area just in case, I took a break and continued the next day.

I progressed the game for about an hour and a half from Disney Gulch and took another break. Upon launching the game again, the save file rolled back to the beginning of Disney Gulch from the second run again. The auto save was unable to replace that save file for unknown reason.

The backup save file shouldn't cause this issue as I put the backup save file into a zip file. I tried to verify the integrity of the game and the issue still persisted.. So I ended up tweaking the game for more than an hour before reinstalling the game which restored the save file system.

All and all, I was hoping this game would be some random casual games I could play in between some more difficult games from my backlogs, but I ended up having frustration because the game has a lot of missables, terrible technical issues, and not to mention some random crashes here and there..