[kremlin]

my first thought was the same, but I still had an intuition that it makes sense to call this sort of thing quantum as opposed to other, say, chemical-based senses which, although still at some level obviously relying on quantum physics, are more readily explained by using higher level concepts.

I suppose it comes down to emergent phenomena: what's the lowest-level concept you HAVE to invoke to understand what's going on here? when you want to explain how taste buds work, you can talk about neural paths and chemical chains, and even though each of those things relies on quantum physics to exist, you don't have to invoke the concepts or objects of the quantum world to understand the phenomenon in question. but with this particular phenomenon, you do. you can't just explain how this works with higher level concepts, you have to get low down.