The coastline paradox is useful as an illustration of how any measurement or observation is performed against an abbreviated version of reality that corresponds

The coastline paradox is useful as an illustration of how any measurement or observation is performed against an abbreviated version of reality that corresponds to a specific practical purpose, whereas the underlying complete reality is never phenomenologically accessible. (Measuring the coastline to arbitrarily high precision would require an arbitrarily high amount of energy and time, all the while the coastline is undergoing natural processes that change the result of the measurement.) Just how there can never be a complete map, there can never be a complete and provably correct model of reality. A sufficiently detailed map becomes the territory, and if you with your measuring apparatus are part of the territory then you’d need to recurse infinitely. The fact that there can never be a complete map (complete and provably correct model of reality) is irrelevant to natural science itself, but it’s relevant to how we think about natural science and its limitations when it comes to explanatory capabilities.