Old man Jberg360 here with some old timey grumbles.
One of the reasons I moved away from fluffies years ago (aside from personal reasons) was that the fandom shifted from “innocents survive in a cruel world” to what I now see called “Hellgremlins” In that time a lot of the “canon” lore never changed. The fall of Cleveland was a good story but influenced daily posting and art very little. Same with PETA.
The fluffy fandom started as a corruption of the mlp overly positive world view and the lore was based on the explosion of mlp merch and fandom. It made sense that Hasbio/Hasbro would be the company to take things to the next level. A passing joke was that PETA let them go not for an explanation of them being incomplete but as an explanation as to why they could breed in the wild. Because Hasbio would have sold them as neutered creatures under their complete control. If PETA hadn’t released the breeding stock we wouldn’t have the feral population.
Now people came up with a lot of story ideas around that early release and some of it was good enough to keep. Personally, I like to think Hasbio didn’t think fluffies could even live on their own as they created them to be dependent on their own name brand fluffy food (that looked like sketties). Without a proprietary enzyme in the food the digestive tract couldn’t absorb nutrients. Of course they did survive but they have constant shits because they aren’t getting that enzyme and it messes with their bowels.
Now that last paragraph was my personal canon, and as far as I know not shared with anyone. But I keep it in the back of my head when I create fluffy stuff but it honestly hasn’t come up as an interesting plot point in any story so I don’t mention it. The same can be true for fluffies being a complete/incomplete product or if they actually came from Hasbio. It hasn’t been something important to my stories so I don’t write about it.
And that is sort of the point. A person doesn’t need to acknowledge that the PETA break in happened of that they are even a product of Hasbio unless they need a reason for fluffies to exist to tell their story. I couldn’t tell you how many people have old lore as canon since people don’t typically say, but I suspect that for the first year, most people post something they find interesting and learn a little from comments that let them seek out different stories and discover the older lore. They might build on it or reject it.
Long story short. You do you, create something you like and if others like it they might run with your ideas and the canon and lore may change over time. Good or bad.