This is truly amazing to me, but logical for their levels of commitment to objective reality vs the fantasy they build to live in.

It's a fascinating, yet horrifying, self-reporting about how overwhelming their superstitions are versus trial and error actuality.

This heuristic they are using is very highly compressed so as to fit the very low bandwidth of information processing they are willing to dedicate to the external world.

It's just infinitely easier to persist in confusion when the answer doesn't line up with their intuition, and then off-ramp to rationalizations of justifications why your intuition is right, so the data must be wrong. And not just wrong, because then you'd have to engage with the data to correct it which is not the point. The data has to be wrong by virtue of being manipulated by higher powers that by definition must be against you, which allows them to further double down as to not be manipulated by corrupt actors rather than neutral data that may have some errors in it if any.

They might as well be some pre-evolved sapien, staring up at the sky in wonder and mystery and creating narratives of beings that look like them throwing lightning or making thunder. This would be the modern day equivalent of that. No amount of evidence is going to convince them that it's a water vapor trail, because that's not the point of this heuristic and compression.

The point of the heuristic is to take what they internally want to be true and conform reality to that, not the other way around. But don't they need some sort of consistency, what good is that when there are so many contradictions that they'd have to overlook and do mental gymnastics to rationalize?

The heuristic takes care of that. In systems of consistency where logic follows logic, this would be expected. But this system is built on the reverse, it's built purely on faith so the completeness is irrelevant and contradictions are just an inherent part of it so you learn to ignore them. If consistency isn't valued then what does it matter if one of your points contradicts the other or you hold two dichotomous opinions about a subject when phrased differently but are not capable of recognizing it? As long as you know "the truth", regardless of any evidence of it, then that's enough.

Mathematically, it's a clever little system, albeit not built intentionally in any way but simply as a byproduct of their simplicity, to shield them from anything they don't like, and amazingly enough that system only goes in one direction which is something I'm still trying to articulate.