Physicists tends to work with precision in decimals, not multiple orders of magnitude. They didn't know it would be there either, all they knew is the theory they had would be simpler if it was there than not.

Your quote from the website is a bad attempt at backdating current knowledge from very recent research and experiments to the original discoverers

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-higgs-boson-ruined-peter-higgss-life/

The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs’s prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime.

It's not even known if there's more than one Higgs boson, because the theory allows multiple variants.

Look at that graph of how many different variants would decay differently;

https://home.cern/news/series/lhc-physics-ten/higgs-boson-revealing-natures-secrets

They had thousands of different predictions and couldn't know which were right until the data was in.

If, due to its mass, they could only observe the interplay between the Higgs boson on one hand and the W and Z bosons on the other, the puzzle of the fermion masses would remain unsolved. Discovering the particle at a convenient mass was an unexpected kindness from nature. If it were slightly more massive, above 180 GeV or so, the options to study it at the time of its discovery would have been more limited.

The variety of available transformation products means that data from the individual channels can be combined together through sophisticated techniques to build up a greater understanding of the particle. “Doing so is not trivial,” says Giovanni Petrucciani, co-convener of the Higgs analysis group in CMS. “You have to treat the uncertainties similarly across all the individual analyses and interpret the results carefully, once you have applied complicated statistical machinery.” Combining data from the transformation of the Higgs boson to pairs of Z bosons and pairs of photons allowed ATLAS and CMS to discover the Higgs boson in 2012.

It was legitimately not known if we could find it. It could have been big enough that LHC would've failed, and then it could have taken us 50 more years to build a collider large enough (mostly due to cost, but still)

In fact they're only mostly sure still

Yet, the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism remains among the least-understood phenomena in the Standard Model. Indeed, while scientists have dropped the “-like” suffix and have understood the Higgs boson remarkably since its discovery, they still do not know if what was observed is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model.

You don't even understand what I'm saying, how can you accuse me of walking back?

You keep making unjustified claims even now. What if a simulator knows what you're looking at and simply don't mess with that? Clearly not impossible. Implausible? Absolutely, AND I KEEP SAYING SO, there's no reason to believe it's happening, and yet it's possible. Your inability to comprehend doesn't change the meaning of my statements.

Your persistence in calling it meaningless because it's unfalsifiable with no further context is equivalent to you calling most theoretical physics meaningless. A ton of theories like string theory is by your standard equally unfalsifiable and therefore we shall declare it impossible and stop investigating.

Instead we develop endless hypothetical scenarios specifically so we can look for evidence when new tools for investigating fundamental physics become available.