Definitely an own goal, rather than a deflection.

And yet there's some doubt as to whether the OG is attributed correctly. Most people who watch football would say Simon f*cked up badly. But records are gonna say Pedri did it. What we really want records to reflect is the responsible part, no? Even that ends up in a bit of a grey area if we consider that a lot of goals are scored as tap-ins where the credit should really go to someone who unlocked the defense.

Yep, that's hard to attribute to an attacker with maximum effort, so should count as one of those extremely rare own goals. My guess (without having seen all the games) is that it's just 1-2 in the tournament, and that the figure historically has been just 0..2 as well. What would stand out would be if there were 4-5 such goals in a tournament. Not that there is a dozen of the "defender own-goals from the goal-line" type.

I think you're nitpicking a bit but let's go along with your definition and rephrase the question: why are there so many "defender own-goals from the goal-line" in this tournament? It's still an interesting question