What's important is coming up with a theory that can make accurate predictions. No need to worry about whether it actually corresponds to reality.
The base of this definition of information has nothing to do with time. It is rather a mathematical measurement for entropy.
True, but what do you expect for a popular review of a book that itself is a popular review of some pretty abstract ideas.
The basic concept is not just that our universe can be described by statistical measures, but that the foundational laws seem to be governed by statistics. At the small scale (individual particles), quantum mechanics basically says that the universe runs itself by rolling dice in very particular ways. Events involving these particles seem to simply be the tangible embodiment of Shannon entropy. Even at the everyday scale of refrigerators and gasoline engines, entropy calculations are the bread and butter of thermodynamics engineers.
It is a major open question in physics whether entropy and statistics are truly foundational, or whether they are simply the large scale average result of a fine-grained deterministic foundation. The "Copenhagen interpretation" takes statistics to be fundamental, and by gosh the calculations sure work nice, but there is no evidence that it reflects a higher truth.
Re. the anthropic principle in physics, it is one approach to answering why certain laws of physics seem to be balanced on a knife edge between chaos on one side and stagnation on the other. If we posit that universes can be created with nearly arbitrary physical laws, then naturally we find ourselves in one that is neither too chaotic nor too stagnant for our existence. The creation of such a universe might be unlikely, but given enough opportunity it is inevitable. This allows for bizarre physical laws without requiring magic or divine intervention. (There are even evolutionary approaches, where events like black hole formation create a new universe similar to its parent. That way if you find yourself in a part of the multiverse conducive to your kind of life, neighboring universes are likely to be very rich in friendly conditions.)
"And how could it be, if we need minds and language to discuss 'information' in the first place?"
If the evolutionary approach were true, universes of pure thought could potentially be created, where the very atoms were symbols grounded in some reality. A mind there wouldn't pick up a pen to draw a symbol, it would just think it into existence. Or such a parent universe could create a universe like ours, to test whether symbol processing is a necessary law of physics, or if it can spontaneously arise from semi-chaotic fundamental laws.
Philosophy is one of those subjects that most intelligent persons think they can master pretty well. It all seems pretty simple and straightforward. Especially physicists fall into that trap again and again, up to great string theorists putting forward anthropocentric theories of the universe. These people usually make trivial mistakes that any real philosopher spots in no time. Intelligence is not a substitute for knowledge and this guy seem to have fallen into the same trap as well. In this case you don't even need to be a philosopher. He defines information based on the frequency of 'events'. This means that both time and 'events' are more primal than his notion of 'information'. Consequently, 'information' is not at the root of anything. And how could it be, if we need minds and language to discuss 'information' in the first place?