You are absolutely right, I misread that entirely. Thanks. I also misattributed the original comment and the follow-up to the same author.
The problem with pursuing "identity" is that these rules don't anchor the identity of pieces so far as I can tell. If the players agree that for expediency the inverted rook is a queen, the move notation would call it a queen, it would in fact be a queen for the purposes of that game. The only way anyone could tell which token was used in place of a normative queen shaped piece would be if there were video or photographs of the actual board at that phase of the game. And it doesn't affect those other people. In a formal setting it seems like an arbiter or judge or proctor or whomever should also be informed for accurate record keeping.
The fruit analogy raises the stakes to fraud while the use in a game, unless a player tried to cheat, is inconsequential to those players.