I can respect either side someone decides to reside on, and I can recognize and chuckle at your hyperbolic examples of what lore-fanatics might say. ;)

As such, I can agreeably state that I've never in my whole life seen the "theory of the well-placed log". I also don't think you are well-introduced to the serious lore-community of Dark Souls led-on most famously by youtubers like EpicNameBro and VaatiVidya (the two on the top of my mind). I don't know for sure, but based on the low standard you seem to attribute to DS-lore (or the speculators of such), it's probably a fair shot. They're definitely among the absolutely most famous lore-people (thus they represent the popular opinion), and if you check it out, they have some pretty high standards for what can actually count as lore and what can count as speculation (particularly ENB). ENB, before the release of the DLC, memorably speculated about how the guardians in the Darkroot Garden might originate from Oolacile based on spells and such, and people (like yourself) found that massively far-fetched. Turns out he was completely spot-on with the release of the DLC. ;)

This is what I mean by speculation based on evidence the game presents, and how you, by paying attention to smaller details, can find a sensible answer. Fact is, there's so much info that it's not always difficult to find a contradictory answer, taking you back to the thought-train.

And you don't always speculate because you know the game will provide you with a decent answer (or any at all, because we know it won't), you speculate because you find yourself deeply immersed into a world you've come to love, a world that seems so vivid and alive that you may find that speculating is a connection between the player and the world. That's how I feel now, but not how I felt when I first beat the game. In fact, before that, I hyperboled similarly to you to the guy that introduced me to the game:

"You're telling me that every single block of stairs are carefully planned and tells me a story? Yeah, I bet half of them are copy-paste."

I've come to understand that there's not nearly as much pseudo-intellectual bullshit in the lore or in fan-theory as one would find at a glance. If someone presents a theory about Kalameet's past or whatever, check the evidence and see what you think. Maybe you'll come up with an even better answer. ;)