This is probably reductive and ignorant. I do have some post-grad education on quantum computing, but I by no means have a full grasp of actual mathematical fou

This is probably reductive and ignorant. I do have some post-grad education on quantum computing, but I by no means have a full grasp of actual mathematical foundations of the theory. The main issue I have with the prevailing perspective on QM (including this Zen one, which is more widely accepted than the article makes it sound), is just that it's rather pessimistic and slightly unscientific. When declaring that the world works on this foundation of pure mathematical randomness, you are effectively stating that's the end of the line, there's nothing below to explain the phenomena. Probability is a tool to meaningfully reason about incomplete information, but the information is not fundamentally unknowable. You could for instance say that wether a child will be male or female is purely mathematically random. For all intents and purposes, it is random in the sense we cannot hope to predict it before conception in a single instance. It's not uniformly random, there are external factors that may affect the probability, but it would still be correct to model it as a random variable. But we must never forget it is a model. We do actually (mostly) know why it looks random from a macro scale: (being very simplistic, I might be quite wrong here) we have many molecules with a certain temperature wizzing past each other with Brownian motion, and it is effectively impossible to predict which will react with which, leading to a certain gene to be selected. We cannot predict it, but we can explain it and prove it by experimental means. It's a chaotic system ruled by relatively simple rules, and we can do a lot of meaningful work with that. I'm sure many professional physicists also treat QM as an abstraction and model, and there are people trying to peek under the rug. But the community has mostly failed to express this perspective when communicating with a wider audience, and possibly between themselves and their students, for the last century. Physicists like to redefine the word "real" as to mean "the mathematical model that currently best fits observations", but that is not the common sense of the word. It is merely a pragmatic excuse to focus students on actual publishable research and prevent them from getting constantly philosophical. But it does also make it slightly heretical to keep researching how these phenomena emerge from underlying laws. Which, to an outsider, is kind of the whole point of physics. To be fair, it is becoming exceedingly expensive to do any experimental work in this area. And as long as we don't have a good number of strong measurements that differ from the theory's predictions, we can only formulate plausible but mostly unprovable theoretical models. I understand why the community is pushing students away from such folly with a small sprinkling of dogmatism.