I came to Rovelli because, after having spent a long time studying QM (informally but mathematically: I read, for instance, Dirac’s primer), I arrived at the relational conclusion completely independently. To really simplify one aspect of the reasoning, consider two maximally entangled particles. The mathematical description of such a system is one in which you know only the relationship between the particles and nothing about the state of the individual particles. The relationship has entirely subsumed the “things”. If, as Bell has effectively proven, the QM description is complete, then the situation is, as David Mermin puts it, one of “correlations without correlata”. And given that QM fundamentally is all about entanglement, then the conclusion almost forces itself on you that there are no intrinsic properties, only relational ones - at the fundamental level. At least that was my conclusion, and, it turned out, Rovelli’s too. Rovelli explicitly states in Helgolsnd that people kept asking him if he’d read Nagarjuna - because they recognized the Buddhist parallels. It was not a preexisting philosophical position imposed on quantum phenomena at all. The book is clearly about quantum mechanics *and its implications*. To say that Rovelli would claim that things don’t at least appear to have intrinsic properties is absurd. Of course he would recognize that classical things appear to have intrinsic existence and properties. He goes into some depth about the illusion of the separateness of everyday objects. So I think you’ve misread him completely. He is the originator of Relational Quantum Mechanics, and Helgoland was his attempt to explain the implications of it as he sees it to a lay audience. And the reason I am certain this is the case is because I followed precisely the same path of reasoning ( though of course as a non physicist I did not independently invent the whole of RQM).