I think your Mickey statement only further supports the fact that Nomura tries to tie everything together and everything is important in some manner in his mind lol
The timing is suspicious considering it's been months since MOM released but we are only a few days past the second to last UX update. This wasn't a plot detail people were obsessing over and demanding explanation over. Compared to the dozens of other requested additions to this game, this really had no reason to exist unless Nomura felt it had importance.
Clarifying that it wasn't AtW, Ienzo, and Evan's intention for Kairi to dive into her memories of the Final World which then lead to her remembering when Xehanort stuffed her into an ark seems like a pretty clear through line to UX (as much as I wish it wasn't)
My point in comparing the two is that Nomura's fixation with consistency is itself inconsistent. Nomura will regularly allow for multiple narrative and lore-based inconsistencies throughout the series to exist and violate established canon, but every now and then he will focus time and effort on making sure that specific less significant details are treated with noteworthy faithfulness. Nomura's style of storytelling has conditioned fans to look for clues in every minuscule little detail, but those same fans neglect the copious instances of blatant and overt inconsistency that completely contradict this idea that Nomura is always obsessive over details and that we should always pay extraordinary attention to every little thing he puts in these games.
In other words, not everything has to connect to something bigger, and even Nomura himself doesn't care half the time about how tight the story and world-building are. Maybe someone told Nomura they were confused about the ending, and he decided to just shove in this little extra bit of dialogue. Who knows?
Of course, I could be completely wrong. Nomura is, after all, crazy. But conceptually, I don't see any possible way in which this little extra clarifying tidbit connects at all to the UX story or to anything else. The resounding assumption by fans here that it does, however, is what I find peculiar, though not entirely unexpected given how Nomura has conditioned us.
