You seriously don't see the absurdity of these two answers from the same position?
THEY BOTH MAKE NO SENSE.
They don't both have to outrun the owlbear, one just has to outrun the other. Or in other words, which one holds up better against a casual examination? "Which makes less sense" is a viable critique in that regard.
"Chewing you out" doesn't make "less" sense than the idea that hit points are your skill in dodging a blow even though you never consult hit points to actually dodge something when rules when the rules call for dodging something. They're both absurd ideas that get erased in the abstraction that is hit points, and it doesn't matter if one is "absurd to the 5th degree" and the other is "absurd to the 6th degree" since once you reach "absurd to any degree" the entire concept either becomes an abstraction or needs help.
They don't get "erased" in the abstraction - even if it is abstract, there's still an idea that's understood as what's being abstracted. That idea still needs to make a certain degree of sense, to the point that disbelief can be suspended. I'm saying that one accomplishes that better than the other.
No one's talking about discarding hit points altogether, and when there are only two models, and one is absurd to the 5th degree, and the other is absurd to the 6th degree, then you go with the lesser of the two absurdities.
I am not trying to make sense of this - you're the one here trying to say it's a Wuxia movie while simultaneously claiming there is some logical explanation here for each of these things. There is no logical explanation here for many things that happen at high level.
There is a logical explanation for things that happen at high level; the presence of wuxia doesn't somehow mean that logic is thrown out the window. I suspect that you find these concepts irreconcilable because you take "logic" to mean "functioning according to how things work in the real world," whereas I'm taking it to mean "functions by internally consistent explanations."
If you use the latter definition, the idea of hit point loss as physical damage holds up. Hit point loss as an unspecified mixture of physical damage, luck, morale, divine protection, and fatigue does not.
Just give in to the fact that hit points are such an abstraction that you cannot focus on the details too much. When you focus on the details too much, it makes no sense, particularly at high levels. It's a gamist invention. It's not simulating anything. At one time it tracked how many actual hits you could take, but that time is long past and now it's an amorphous number you track on a sheet of paper which sometimes you can try and explain for entertainment and sometimes it's best to just not think about it too much.
I agree that it's a gamist construct, but it's not a dissociated mechanic in terms of what it represents, since it has an in-game analogue, that being that when your hit points are gone you're dead (or otherwise out of the fight). Ergo, you need to tie an in-game explanation to what's happening in that case. It's not like feat slots, where there's no easy way to explain what they are from an in-character standpoint. Hit points do mean something, even if that meaning is one that only holds up to casual scrutiny.
