Zero volts isn’t dead. Zero volts is killed, shoved a stake through the heart, encased the corpse in concrete, and buried the body upside down so it can’t possibly rise again. A dead battery is up around 10 volts or so. Once the voltage drops below about 11 volts or so the battery starts to chemically self-destruct. Zero volts is dead beyond any hope of ever recovering.
I suppose that it’s possible that your car died because the battery went completely flat. Modern cars rely on the battery being present to do the bulk of the filtering and voltage regulation. With a completely dead battery, many cars won’t run.
It’s also possible that the reason you have a dead battery now is due to the starter solenoid getting jammed trying to crank a seized engine, and the solenoid staying engaged and draining the battery flat (in which case I would expect it to kill the battery fairly quickly). This would also explain the battery cables getting hot (as described in the OP), which you wouldn’t get with a dead alternator.
If you are mechanically inclined, you can remove the belts on the engine (you may just have one serpentine belt - I’m not familiar with the design of your vehicle) and pull out the spark plugs. Then take a decent sized socket wrench and put it on the crankshaft pulley. With a good sized socket wrench, you should be able to get enough leverage on it to spin the engine by hand. If you can’t spin it, then there is something mechanical stopping the engine from spinning, or in other words, it’s seized.
If you can’t spin it, you may want to try to remove the starter if you want to test whether the starter shaft is binding up with the flywheel and that is stopping the engine from spinning. If the shaft has jumped part of a tooth and is really smashed in there good, removing the starter may take some work with a pry bar and a hammer (in addition to the normal work required to remove it).