That's the same thing here, though, since physics is a scientifically descriptive endeavor. Our conceptualization of the universe is limited by our perception o

That's the same thing here, though, since physics is a scientifically descriptive endeavor. Our conceptualization of the universe is limited by our perception of it, and thus the whole idea of "what the universe does" is fundamentally entangled in what we see it doing and how we can talk about it. So that the universe "optimizes" something must be true, given that only one past is observed. It has to have been optimizing for the past that we see. (It is perhaps more remarkable that we can make accurate predictions of the future, but this more or less seems to be a side-effect of optimization requiring some notion of continuity.) Our descriptions of nature are clean because they are based on observations of the past, which are the exact phenomena the universe appears to be optimized to produce. All other possible results are merely counterfactuals in our brains, and having those encoded in our theories would make them noisy and inaccurate. (And the best evidence for such counterfactuals being 'real' does exactly this by introducing quantum indeterminacy into the theory.)