Yeah, the description on Wikipedia is a bit hard to grasp. It took me a while to really understand it.
I don't have in-depth knowledge about all the discussions happening, so I appreciate your perspective. Please correct me if I make assumptions that aren't true.
All I have is a very far away perspective where I see bits and pieces of where the discourse is going, as a general trend. My impression of Tumblr over the years has always been of a place where people keep coming up with more and more labels. And as time went by, those labels felt increasingly empty and redundant to me. Maybe it makes more sense to view those waves with blurred boundaries.
When I said "subsequent waves have pretty much removed this level of elaboration", I think I left out too much information about what I mean. I don't think those waves have completely gotten rid of explanations, but they shifted to be more about other concepts and terms rather than actual experiences. Holotherianthropy seems like the perfect example of that to me, and I still do believe it's a perfect example for the "pure simulacrum" stage.
The statement "I am physically a wolf" is objectively false, so the only way to have it make any sense is to disconnect the concept "physical form" from its roots in our common reality. The pedantry you're talking about are efforts to achieve exactly that.
None of this means that those labels can't have any meaning to those people, and that wasn't the intention of the original reply on Werelist nor was it mine here.
It's just a very plausible explanation for why a lot of modern discourse has felt so inherently empty to me, as if people are saying things without saying anything at all.
Some of the things they're saying are actually outright offensive to me. I wouldn't be suffering if I could "physically be a dragon" just by saying so. Maybe this statement means something to them, but to me it's all meaninglessly throwing around words and concepts.
As for the quadrobics thing, the original post didn't specify the stage it corresponds to, so I just kinda assumed he included it in the third wave. He may have intentionally left it out because it's an entirely different beast.