There is a point of view which says that because we don’t directly perceive anything other than our macroscopic world, we have no business inferring anything about the true nature of reality from quantum mechanics.

I just don’t buy this no-inference-allowed argument. In fact, I think it works better in reverse. What we are directly aware of corresponds solely to our neural representation of reality. But mathematical physics, the distillation of the results of millions of experiments, gives a much more detailed, in-depth, and unified picture of the physical world than our sense-based view. Thus the picture of the physical world that mathematical physics gives us—that we live in a world made of wave functions (see No Evidence for Particles and the last paragraph of Mass, Spin, and Charge)—is more likely to correspond to a scheme which is closer to the ‘actual nature’ of reality than the everyday picture given by our neural representation.