This is accurate, yes. The cat in the box is "conscious" presumably, but still can be "not an observer" from the POV of the scientist observing the experiment from outside the box.
I have no idea who Kastrup is.
No idea what you're talking about with getting desperate. I got a little more detailed in another comment about what I was and wasn't claiming ("I'm honestly not saying it's as simple as" etc). I stand by my statement that QM is about quite a lot more than coordinate systems, and in my opinion will make it look weird in retrospect once physics expands to a more coherent whole that includes the special properties of the observer in a way that's something other than "yeah we don't know WTF that's about and we try not to think about it".