It is plausible that the first population movement into the Pacific came first from the Pacific Northwest. This certainly was the thesis of Thor Heyerdahl long before he did Kon Tiki. He produced a very thick book on the topic which i actually own and have read.
The major population centers on the Coast were Haida Gwaii also known as Markland, the Alaska Panhandle as Heluland and Vancouver Island known also as Vinland. All those populations have a stone age antiquity of at least 20,000 years. More critically they produced monster dugout canoes from our giant cedars and their life way was based on fishing.
After all that it was no trick at all for them to take wind and current to Hawaii. Better yet, exploration meant that they typically set out against the wind and current in order to allow an easy retreat.
My key point that i want to make is that two way traffic was completely possible and that they had it for thousands of years. Thus a well known and understood stone age folk made the jump to Hawaii and then into the Polynesian Triangle and ultimately to include New Zealand.
This initial movement established fishing populations and then allowed much later populations to come in from South East Asia bringing additional tool kits. Detecting all that and a limiting belief on the early ability of ancient mariners has led to the idea that all came from SE Asia.
Yikes. We also hear a legend of the separation of land and sky without a sun. This could well be the Pleistocene Nonconformity. Many decades passed before the sun became visible again.
This documentary essentially accepts all my own teachings as well derived from other cultural sources and from geology. The good news is that the cultural sources do speak to thousands of years of history and occupation. All this remains controversial but that is more a commentary of scholarly ignorance.
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