Thanks for taking the time to explain it further. This is a topic that keeps me up thinking about, not because a fundamental randomness is distasteful, but because it doesn't seem to match with what we see, and I'm wondering if we are getting caught up in describing laboratory/pure math isolated states rather than what actually occurs in nature.

In reality the entangled particle will interact with something almost instantly thus collapsing it. The cat is actually dead or alive from the perspective of the microscopic things in the box. A world never witnessed or measured by a being doesn't collapse it's entire history of interactions of every subatomic particle, atom, molecule and emergent property from the start of the universe to 'now' instantaneously upon being viewed. The photons from that world have been hitting earth continuously since earth existed after all.