>I don’t really view 30 hours of stacked exposures as “a photo I took”, rather as the outcome of a lengthy signals processing chain

Is there a difference? It's still a photometrically correct capture of the scene, unless you're using narrow-band filters or multispectral compositing you would see the same if you had huge eyes. In the same way a stacked smartphone photo is still a photo unless it's also using AI, and even then AI denoisers are pretty much accepted in photography as long as they don't meaningfully affect the subject (as well as more traditional things like CPLs or extra lighting).

Nothing in Nikon's challenge is natural, it's still a photo as long as it represents something real.