I feel like this explanation is a good step but misses the crux that any combustion process (even with a non-oxygen oxidizer, if that's still called combustion) exists because each broken bond releases enough energy to break the bond of neighboring atoms/molecules with some left over to convert to heat.

The heat is a byproduct of the cascade reaction that allows combustion to occur, which structurally in my mind is very similar to fission processes where neutron bombardment produces excess neutrons to bombard more atoms.