This is a very clarifying way to put it.

What feels especially important here is that the “median voter” is not just a bad summary, but a character produced by the measuring instrument. Once that character exists, political imagination starts treating it as if it were a person with motives, contradictions, and demands.

The network framing feels much more psychologically real to me. People are not points drifting toward a center; they are partial overlaps across many dimensions. Consensus then becomes less about finding the average person, and more about finding which overlaps can actually hold.