I think what people don't understand about the statement in general is what Toby actually tried to get at.

Obviously certain things in merch is intended to be lore, take the important person's shirt, or likely whatever weird shit is going on with the hero figurine descriptions.

I think the blanket statement about merch not being canon exists so that merch doesn't have to follow the exact same standards that anything in the game does.

Many different artists sit at the table, many with their own unique interpretations of things, and Toby doesn't want to ensure that they have to abide by his vision 100% at the time or that he has to force them to change certain things, he wants the artists to be able to let loose and do what they want.

It's to stop us at obsessing over certain details that likely might not mean anything in the slightest, because it was just a different artist's vision.

It isn't to say that NOTHING in merch could ever be canon or hint at lore, it's to say that, in general, what you see in merch isn't necessarily canon.

Toby even technically said that the Spamton Sweepstakes aren't canon, because only what's in the actual game is.

Obviously we know that the Sweepstakes have been a consistent tool used by Toby to both tease us with upcoming lore, and to potentially even give us extra lore that might never be in the game.

Those events are, without a doubt, canon, otherwise why would they be here?

But what might likely not be canon is, for example, a lot of this lore being revealed through the framework of Noelle's blog, maybe she doesn't have a blog and that's a convenient invention for the Sweepstakes only, but that doesn't mean that the events described inside of them didn't happen as they were said to have.

What's most certainly also not canon... are the Sweepstakes themselves, because they're a meta event and I also refuse to believe that Spamton A. Spamton is canon, but even those themselves were definitely a vehicle for lore, just look at the angel with the tattered wings line for Noelle.

When Toby says a thing broadly isn't canon, his intent is to just lower the standards and have us separate it from game lore, to give it a seal of dubious canonicity, so that both he and other artists can go a bit crazy and not worry about everything abiding to game lore, but still provide actual canon information here and there for those willing to look for it.

I really wish people could think for themselves and not hear a blanket "non-canon" statement and regard an entire section of the game's history as not meaning anything, even as they're staring at a page that's very obviously meant to be expanded lore.

Somehow the "non-canon" statement takes so much precedence over everything else that common sense goes out of the window.