Realism and counterfactual definiteness are somewhat subjective. QM in general doesn't say that the cat is both dead and alive until the box is open, it says that there is a 50% probability that, upon opening, you will find a dead cat in the box. QM itself doesn't say anything about whether or not the cat is actually dead or alive before the box is open. That's the job of the interpretation. CI and MWI are the most popular interpretations of QM, and they both say explicitly that we can't know whether the cat is dead or alive. It does NOT say that the cat is both dead and alive, or neither dead nor alive, before the box is opened. However, there are interpretations of QM that say that the cat's fate was determined when the poison was or was not released, and since then has always been either dead or alive. In otherwords, the cat being dead or alive is independent of whether or not we open the box, even though the observation happens when the box is opened. Furthermore, CI states that observation causes wavefunction collapse, but doesn't fully define what actually constitutes an "observation". Some interpretations of QM say that the observation occurs when the particle hits the detector, either because the environment is doing the observation, or because the cat is doing the observation, or whatever.
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