lava, none and all other special province types are sorta counted as countries while the game sorts provinces
names i assume is when the text is moved it gets quickly deleted and respawned due to if i don't do it that way it gets weird resolutions and stuff
i will look into the phantom countries, i haven't experienced it yet but last time i played there where some issues with some events odds so they didn't happen as often as they should
but i suspect it might be a country making a fort on some small province and then when they get annex or divided survive on that small province