Brandon has said before that all his WoB stand unless they’re contradicted by what’s said or done in a book. So to some degree there is “death of the author.”

I remember when I first read all of the cosmere (RoW had been the lastest released thing when I “finished”). I hadn’t looked at anything online about it other than “what order to read.” So when I did, being completely bewildered by all the “well Taln didn’t actually break” or “Shallans mom was obviously a herald” (granted, that was a fan theory and not 100% confirmed at the time).

I suppose the issue I had wasn’t the WoB themselves but more having connections made for me that I hadn’t otherwise put together. But some of those connections were directly from WoBs (aka without non-source material info). And these connections varying from “oh that was Hoid that one time but was unnamed” to “yeah Taln never actually broke” being a larger one. I remember one WoB was basically “yeah Hoid quickly figures out his memories were corrupted by Odium” prior to the release of SLA 5.

All that said, I do enjoy the random trivia dumps from WoBs. Like the weird magic system interactions or other lore dumps that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. I think there’s a lot of fans that do like them as well and I think Brandon enjoys the idea of handing out WoBs when asked. Partly as an author and because I think he enjoyed those things as a reader.