lens - F-stop vs T-Stop - how do I quickly grasp a videographers view of the world?

I'm aware this is flirting with video rather than photography, but the question really relates to how each world can be understood by the other.

Very briefly - I am an amateur photographer who actually works in the TV/film industry, but not in that capacity. I had a brief chat with the focus-puller on a movie the other day & we quickly realised that our conversation had a translation barrier.

I wanted to quickly understand how they were managing to get such a good picture in relatively low light. They had a long depth of field on a very large sound stage; one I'd equate to maybe f6 - f8 or more, yet they appeared to be able to pull in a lot of light for such a small apparent aperture.

The simple question, "How are you getting so much light at such an apparently small aperture?" was met with an impasse as we reached, "..but we don't use f-stops, we use t-stops" & neither of us knew how to translate that quickly & simply to the other's language, though each of us understood what the other system was in theory.

Our brief conversation ended at that point - no-one gets to hang around just idly chatting for long on that kind of movie, so we never did establish whether they were actually capable of getting a lot of light in through a large aperture whilst preserving DoF or whether they could ramp up their ISO far enough to make an amateur photographer weep.

I'm aware I'm potentially asking for guesswork at this point, but...
Could you have a lens with a very wide aperture that can still have a high DoF, or is that 'breaking' physics. Alternatively, is it possible they actually are capable of what I would consider 'far too high' ISO & still stay noiseless?

From comments - could it be simply that as they're using relatively long exposure times, 1/24s, the problem 'fixes itself'? As the conversation was interrupted, we never did get to discuss that as an option.

For the sake of argument, let's consider this to be an unlimited budget question.

I did later get to see the lens box for one of the cameras, a range of 8 primes from 24mm 2.2 to 135mm 2.4.