“Who is stronger?” – Might versus Magic.

In general, if this is the case, and the places taken in the qualifying round are not taken into account when forming the bracket, then a blind draw should be held, and everyone gets what they get, or they play according to the first bracket, which, as I understand it, is formed based on the results of the group stage.

There is a misunderstanding here, I will try to explain.
The first bracket is based on the results of the qualifying stage only in the 1/8 stage, and in the 1/4 stage, it is simply arranged in order, and in this part, the places in the groups are not taken into account.
The second bracket corresponds to the places taken in the group, both in the 1/8 and 1/4 stages, because if you simply take the 4 best players from two groups (taking into account Buchholz) and draw a 1/4 bracket, and then look at the new table, you will see that it leads to the previous 1/4 bracket, which was formed before the expansion to 16 participants in the playoff bracket.
Therefore, expanding the number of playoff participants to 16 gives those who did not make it into the top 4 in their group a chance to change something, i.e., to change the 1/4 bracket. Otherwise, the new playoff bracket in the 1/4 stage will be exactly what it was with 8 participants.
Namely, the pairs: Adv - ABKSever, dmitrik - Daniel_M, ХРЕН/GL - Igrok-76, Will-Nobody.
Conclusion: the new bracket is formed taking into account the places taken in the group stage, and not "randomly" or simply by selecting pairs based on strength, as it may seem.
P.S. In general, when voting, I would not take into account the votes of the participants in the lower bracket of the previous version of the table, because it was very easy there, and it is clear that many participants liked this "holiday".