When David Used Smoke to Defeat Some Bees

We were playing Tomb of Annihilation last week, and the players came across a man drenched in honey, being attacked by a swarm of bees.
We rolled initiative.

...David went first and immediately grabbed a handful of green plants and set them on fire. This created a thick black smoke that drove the bees away.

...And combat was finished before it began.
Looking back, I see that there were a few things I could have done differently, had I wanted to. Spend an action to search for a suitable plant. Another action to light it. An attack with advantage vs. the bees while wielding this smoky bundle. Maybe even an extra d12 damage because it's "driving the bees off." But the end result is the same: The bees were defeated and the man was rescued.
You see, I've started hanging loosely onto my encounters. They are no longer an extension of my being. I've started thinking of the world as a kind of simulation instead of a video game with contrived circumstances with specific solutions in mind. It's more Breath of the Wild and less like Doom. I design open-ended problems and I don't worry about solutions: Players love solving problems. And they love solving problems in ways you can't anticipate. I certainly can't.

I'm not mad about David's smoke solution. In fact, I wouldn't change a thing about how I ruled it. Clever play should be rewarded and allowed to cut through encounters sometimes. In the future I'll certainly make it a little harder, or at least slower, for him to implement this exact same solution. I wasn't trying to model a huge fight. This wasn't the encounter at the end of a campaign: This was a random encounter while the party traveled through the jungles of Chult.

And sometimes you just wanna smoke some bees and get on with your life.