Kind of ridiculous to try to put a price on something like that. It's not about the cubic centimeters of tree stem. The article notes this, in fairness, but the exercise is still carried out.
It makes sense to have a rule that the punishment for vandalism depends in part on the monetary value of the damaged/destroyed object. If you have such a rule, why should you make an exception for some objects, e.g. the most famous few? What's the justification for an exception?
"The estimated price is high and very imprecise" strikes me as poor. A famous object really is valuable (in a cultural sense) and if the monetary estimate is high, that seems much more appropriate to me than not having an estimate.
It is a ridiculous process. The cubic centimeters of tree stem have nothing to do with it. So why take that number and multiply it by some other arbitrary number to come up with an arbitrary value? The cubic centimeters of tree stem can provide some idea of a minimum value, but for famous objects, the material value is not the primary issue.
The cultural / heritage value is inestimable, but certainly much greater than the given figure by orders of magnitude.
Every rule applies poorly to some corner case. That is a necessary consequence of being simpler than reality: Every time you simplify a model by disregarding a rare or unimportant trait, you make the model poor for the cases where that rare/unimportant trait applies. And you have to simplify, to avoid an unmanageably complex rule. (Let me tell you about the German tax code some day. They really tried to be fair and didn't value simplicity or comprensibility highly.)
In the case of this tree, the computed value according the rule is a very high value, and the real-world value is also a very high value, so what's the problem? This is a rule that produces a fairly good result even in a case where it may be expected to apply badly. That's not a bad rule.
