Second, do you have another explanation for this visible evidence that one nonce series results in a stash of 980,000 BTC?
yea
The nonce was initialized to 1 in Bitcoin 0.1.0 and incremented monotonously:
tmp.block.nNonce = pblock->nNonce = 1;
[...]
if ((++tmp.block.nNonce & 0x3ffff) == 0)
as shown in block 12 that has same initial sequence but started later thus having a lower number. meaning both people started with the same nonce but the second person was behind due to starting later
then at a later update that people began using their own nonces. yet some noobs could have used the original v0.1 code and thus were using same initial sequence
You are still not getting it. The 980,000 can only rationally be explained by a single computer. We don't have multiple computers working in tandem. That would result in repeated nonces from one block to the the next. Instead we have what can only rationally be explained by a single instance monotonically increasing by one for a considerable number of blocks, then resetting. If it were multiple computers, even if they were resetting with the same period, they would frequently result in multiple hits of the same nonce value (one per miner) within a handful of blocks. They certainly wouldn't manifest as unbroken sequences of increment by one, with synchronized reset to zero.