It is a sign of the much greater maturity of the physical collapse models that their parameters can be constrained by experiment. The ability to be constrained is a good sign, not a bad one.

I love John Preskill’s standard nod to superdeterminism in his writings: without mentioning it by name he says “I leave it up to the reader to decide how seriously to take this possibility”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223391

The idea is that the natural laws are fractal, which when mapped out trace many state space configurations. But with a fractal there are always gaps in state space that remain no matter how much you zoom in or out; fractals preserve certain structural invariants at all scales.

So the idea is that counterfactual reasoning sometimes fails in a fractal universe, because statistical independence no longer works as a general rule (your counterfactual could lie in one of those gaps). He first published this idea in 2009 under the name "invariant set postulate":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_set_postulate

His paper with Hossenfelder is also a good overview:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139...

Superdeterminism gets an unnecessarily bad rap.

If determinism is true, don't you mean "necessarily"? :)

Yes. That is a big reason why most physicists do not favor superdeterminism.

The game of life is perhaps a nice analogy here. On the 2d grid of the game of life, a glider seems moving in a certain direction when time moves forward. But in the 3d grid, where time is the third dimension, a glider is just a static volume of space.

The reason we experience time is that the evolution of the block universe does depend on the dimension you look at (e.g entropy generally increases in the positive time dimension), and because our consciousness is an emergent property of a self-sustaining structure within the block universe, it's plausible at least that we perceive movement in time different from movement in space. I realize this is very sloppy wording but I'm having trouble finding better words to describe my intuition here.

That's one way of interpreting it, but superdeterminism does not entail or require this. Superdeterminism can be formulated just fine for a universe that evolves in time from some initial state according to causal processes.

It’s not violated - it simply doesn’t apply because its predetermined that the measurements that are done work well together. The experimenters follow the script.