Yup, it's fundamental in informationt theory. When you write a seed on paper there are indents in the table. If you grind the indents to sawdust that can be reconstructed. It's all a matter of, like you said, who has the capability to find the information and to decode it.

This is actually a fundamental part of cryptography too. "All the computers in the world would take a quintillion years to crack this key" is saying the same thing: it can be cracked, but there's no practical way to do it with current technology. So things can be practically untraceable without being absolutely untraceable.