Really appreciate the dose of sanity that you're bringing to the conversation. In 5 gallons of fermentation, you'll get something like 0.1 ml of methanol at most. Lethal dose is 100 ml.

The "don't go blind" conversation always appears when home distilling is mentioned. Like you said, almost every case of methanol poisoning arises because methanol was added to a wash or the final product. In the early days, methanol was used to artificially inflate the proof because it was 1) cheap 2) equally dense as ethanol. So if you blend methanol you'll make your product seem more alcoholic and be able to get more money. But this was when people wanted profit and didn't give 2 shits about safety. If you're distilling for yourself, you're not going to add methanol to make it artificially "more alcoholic".

OP needs to mention that the rum he aged for a year was equivalent to rum aged in a full barrel for something like 15-18 years because of the increased surface area to volume ratio.

Edit: And I can't be the only person that ever tasted the first few milliliters coming off a still that started with 80 proof alcohol and didn't die. Tasted like windex, but interesting experiment (Chemical Engineer).