it is not a false dichotomy, it is just a binary decision. you either include physics into your reasoning -- or you don't.
WW, and many other authors, rely on common understanding of scientific concepts to help the reader imagine how something would behave. Or they can utilize them within the bounds of dramatic license, for hyperbole, for example. these things appearing in the text doesn't mean that whatever fiction they support is meaningfully integrated into our scientific understanding of the world, or that we can build on the latter to make conclusions about that fiction. it
can be, but it's not in Superhuman. SH is not sci-fi, it just doesn't engage with its concepts like that, giving dramatic consistency much more importance instead
that doesn't make it not nuanced or flawed, but there is a difference. what SH does is equivalent to describing a bright light as 'burning with the strength of a thousand suns'. i understand what that means to convey and have no issue with that. what I have issue with is someone then coming in and saying 'a thousand suns, huh?

well, i did the math and this character can output 150 million C! you can't argue with that, it's literally in the source, "a thousand suns", see?'
or another example is some character controlling water. it's fine to reason about how much destruction they could cause with the amount of water they can control, it is not fine to go: 'well, this character can control anything with hydrogen bonds or maybe matter itself! after all, there's nothing special about water that would make only it, specifically, controllable.'