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What happens to the 8999 remaining bitcoins? Does a server somewhere think they are allocated to a person (although it doesn't have any name attached to them), effectively taking them out of the pool forever? Or are the bitcoins forgotten and free to be mined again or allocated to somebody else?

Or is this just a question that's so bad it's not even wrong?

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Bitcoin does not really understand people or property. It just understands public and private keys. The 8999 remaining bitcoins are presently signed by a public key that has no corresponding private key -- this means they cannot be used in any transaction. Yes, they are effectively lost forever.

What amount of computational power would it take to brute-force recover that private key? For $81,000 it would be worth throwing some considerable hardware resources at it.

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