I agree that the crucial property of quantum systems is interference, specifically "negative probabilities". Just having a dead/alive ambiguity does not make "wavefunction collapse" a reasonable name.
When I first saw this technique, I was interested in replicating it. So I started reading about wavefunction collapse on wikipedia. It had a bunch of complex quantum math and I gave up thiniking the technique was beyond me. But now I see it was also completely irrelevant. Thanks to the bad name, I gave up on it (until now, at least, when I see that its a lot simpler).
This algorithm is actually an instance of constraint propagation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_consistency and constraint satisfaction algorithms generally, that find use in say, computing graph homomorphisms.
This suggests that it be called "PDF collapse," because it is collapsing a probability distribution function instead of a wavefunction.
Of course, random sampling can be quite non-trivial. The Lovasz local lemma comes to mind as something that's similar (but more general) to what the algorithm here achieves.
I certainly understand how people can get annoyed by this kind of marketing. Randomized algorithms have a long tradition, including randomized rounding of fractional relaxations which somebody alluded to, and nobody who worked on those felt the need to mislead with quantum allusions.
It may not be fair to the author to allege that they "felt a need to mislead." They might have just been a coder who thought it would be a cool name.