i personally think that all of this is a poor makeshift for misunderstanding ergodicity at a scale that cannot be measured due to the scale of the smallest possible measuring device
ergodicity is the tendency of a system to explore all possible states but within the cycle of time in which this occurs you cannot predict when you will sample the data and thus it appears "random"
this kind of opacity also exists with the difficulty adjustment of bitcoin
it's not that the number of miners is in a schoedinger's box, it's that you are prevented from measuring it and even if you tried people would hide it from you and then DING they get a solution and suddenly you learn about miners you didn't know exist