I think haze is a property of the real world. It's there in the scene we want to capture to a landscape picture.
In painting art they call it aerial perspective, or atmospheric perspective. It's the painting technique to show the distance to different parts of the painting.
But it's a physical phenomenon, it's really there. We see it, our cameras see it.
You are correct, but that's aside from my point. I'm talking about its effect on the image, comparing the scene with the haze to the same scene if there were no haze.
Sensor DR and scene DR are "apples and oranges", though. Even if your scene+optics only has 10 stops of DR, it is still beneficial to have 14 stops of sensor DR rather than 12 stops, if you plan to do much with the shadows. Sensor DR is not limited by actual recording range; it is limited by practical noise. With sensors, more DR means less noise in the deep shadows; it really isn't about "recordable range", per se.