I don't know if I'd say all human meanings or values are projections. If they are, those meanings would be real as projections. If you project a story onto a big screen, you can fill a theater and charge admission. Society runs on human values and subjective meanings, so we don't just project them; we create them. The objective world shoehorns itself into subjectivity. Personhood isn't an illusion but an emergent reality. We create artificial worlds within nature.

Nature doesn't care about us or our creations, but we can recognize the horrific existential status of that indifference. There's what I'd call an objective aesthetic dimension to all of this horror which motivates our progressive pursuits.