Magical change of appearance in the lore

[Iscah]

But in that case, your answer for 'how canon you want it to be' can't be 'not', because there's a bunch of things that are first divulged in Hildibrand but then become important later, like Godbert Manderville and the truth about Sil'dih.

Hildibrand is a story set in the canon world of FFXIV, so when it references other parts of the world, it is accurate to them.

That does not mean that Hildibrand is true and canon from the outside looking in.

Godbert and Sil'dih exist whether you have done the Hildibrand quests or not, or even if they were hypothetically wiped from the game entirely.

[Cleretic]

Hildibrand is a story set in the canon world of FFXIV, so when it references other parts of the world, it is accurate to them.

That does not mean that Hildibrand is true and canon from the outside looking in.

Godbert and Sil'dih exist whether you have done the Hildibrand quests or not, or even if they were hypothetically wiped from the game entirely.

This is true, but Hildibrand's also the place where a lot of stuff like that first gets expanded on. Big dumb slapstick it might be, but Hildibrand's tendency to 'look low' on the setting and do much smaller stories than we often see means that it shines a light on parts of the setting that just don't get talked about otherwise, because there's pretty much nothing to fight (or craft) about it.

That's basically what I'm trying to say: What Hildibrand says about the world is often something that Hildibrand's getting the first chance to expand on, so you can't just throw the whole thing in the bin of 'non-canon'.