I understood the original point as:

More or less, and as you said the original point was about the possibility of circumventing the "instantiation of middle states". But if I assumed from the beginning the middle states are not important, it would make no sense to argue that such possibility exists. I saw this as a paradox in which on one hand intuitively, the middle matters, but on the other we can reduce it to something that intuitively seems morally OK (i.e. some unrelated abstract computation).

Your intuition that the middle matters seems to match my current information-theoretic understanding, even if you disagree on what exactly makes it so.