[zifk]

I disagree with you on both fronts.

1. The main underpinning of this article is the analytical theory they come up with independent of their simulation. The fact that it explains a few qubits well is exactly why this is interesting. If you were to scale up their model - a spin-1/2 ising model, you would effectively get a classical magnet, which is obviously well described by classical thermodynamics. It's in limit of small systems that quantum mechanics makes thermodynamics tricky.

2. Their time averaging is just to remove fluctuations in the state, not avoid the measurement problem. They're looking at time averages of the density matrix, which still yields a quantum object that will collapse upon measurement. And as their mathematical model points out, this can be true for arbitrary time averaging windows, the limits just change respectively as smaller time averages allow for larger fluctuations. There's nothing being swept under the rug here.