Please address the "reference clients" validity

I’m not sure I understand your point. They stated a long time ago Arcanums were counting as buffs, and while they didn’t specifically say they would fix it, they did fix other enchantments along those lines. So they never contradicted themselves, they even mentioned it in the fix that it WAS counting as buffs in the reference client. This was considered a bug, and therefore fixed along with the ZG ones.