That's pretty much what they describe in the video. The random walk itself is not simulated tick-by-tick, but turned into an faster-to-compute model of the longer term statistical behavior of the walk. It's not quite a case of 'it would happen in the real engine at exactly these points with this seed', but more a statistical argument that it would be expected to happen on that kind of timescale.
But he's assuming that sometimes snow golems causes a creeper to target them, so these are random walks on a minefield, very finite.