“ physicists are well aware that their trade is about mathematical models of magnitudes they can measure (and extra stuff they can't yet comes in handy to do that), not reality or the physical world in itself”

This is entirely oxymoronic and double thinking and exactly the type of mental gymnastics that manipulates what truth is. Physics is based on the physical because it was built upon observation of reality using our senses. Yet modern physics is based on the imaginative and has nothing to do with the physical.

Any measured unit is imaginary. The only thing that exists is the measure.

Exists is based on physical. To be is to exist. To exist must be within physical reality. Without this distinction then we might as well give into the esoteric notion that everything is entirely a mental construct and nothing actually “is.”

How far we’ve come from the physical to the mental and then lack the nuance to distinguish as such and furthermore blur the lines is a disgrace to critical thinking and cognition.