I don’t think Norvig is confused. He explicitly addresses this point right at the top of the article.
His argument is that successfully engineering a system using a statistical method provides some bits of evidence for the hypothesis that the system itself is statistical.
Which is obviously true, so long as we take care to weigh evidence properly.
> there's absolutely no reason to think that tells you anything scientific about the phenomenon you're modeling
No, this is not how evidence works. If you can accurately model a system with method X and you cannot come up with a model that works with method Y, you should think it’s more likely (but not certain) that X is the actual physical model.
And indeed modern cognitive science (see Predictive Processing) also has a bunch of evidence for the brain as a hierarchical predictor, rather than a rule engine.
To your points - planes are not model organisms of birds, but they do shed insight on the bounds that birds must obey, eg thrust-to-weight etc. And the sample efficiency point really needs to die. The human brain is born with an extremely complex prior baked in. An LLM begins pretraining with almost nothing (just a very simple architecture and a few simple algorithms like attention), and has to learn the basic architecture of cognition from scratch. A better baseline would be how many samples were processed by every animal in our genetic ancestry that had a brain, since brains existed.