Laplace is typical use of inference statistics to built an estimator. I don’t really understand your point about parallel universe here. It’s absolutely not necessary for any of the sampling to make sense. Every time you try to measure anything, you are indeed taking a sample of the set of measures you could have gotten given the tools you are using.

I fear you operate under the illusion that frequentist statistics are somehow limited to hypothesis testing. It is absolutely not the case.