Correct, loading a pearl and respawning would throw us off the trail. This is why our aim was to follow the initial travel to the base location, rather than a future pearl TP. The easiest advice in order to throw off nocom is to travel in a straight line in the overworld for perhaps 10k blocks, set a bed quickly, then continue another 10k blocks, then /kill to the bed, then go perpendicularly for a render distance or two before the chunks unload at your death location. Even with some hypothetical tracking improvements (that never actually were written), such as walking back the last 10 minutes whenever a track goes cold, that would still throw it off.

Generally 2 or 3. 1 point of association was given whenever a track went cold, split up among however many players logged off within -6 seconds to +1 seconds of that timestamp (because of chunks unloading on a 5 second schedule). 1 point could be a false positive, but 2 or 3 would be reliably trustworthy.