But isn't the reliable association with 'distribute' suggestive of some sort of collision-oblivious hashtable, where some representation of ' SolidGoldMegikarp' & some representation of 'distribute' inadvertently share expansions?

I don't see how "just enough occurrences to earn a token, but so few it's consistently mistaken for something else" falls out of BPE tokenization - but can kinda sorta see it falling out of collision-oblivious lookup of composite-tokens.