There are strong, consistent, and graded relationships between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol levels, and the mass occurrence of cardiovascular disease.[5] The relationships are accepted as causal.[24][25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...
Researcher says: "saturated fat is bad for you."
I ask: "Is laurin (tri-lauric acid homoglyceride) worse or better than stearin? When lipases release the fatty acids, is free lauric acid worse or better than free stearic acid? Do acetic acid and formic acid count as saturated fats in your analysis? Is there a significant metabolic difference between eating fats as mono-, di-, or triglycerides, or as non-esterified fatty acids? Does the comparison with unsaturated fats change if the fats in question are exposed to heat and oxygen prior to consumption?"
Chemically, those fats are all different. Metabolically, many of them are transformed via catalytic proteins into different chemicals, with certain steps being rate-limited, or resource-competitive with other steps.
But it appears as though no one really knows all that much about fat, other than you need to eat a certain quantity of fatty acids with one double bond three carbons from the terminal end (omega-3) because the human body cannot produce those by itself, and they are required for certain hormones and structures.
As far as I know, coconut oil, when compared to most other common vegetable oils, has a higher fraction of saturated fatty acids in it, but those fatty acids are also significantly shorter than the fatty acids typically found in animal fats and other vegetable oils. They are different fats, and a human body digests them differently. Do they follow different metabolic chains to achieve the same result, or do they produce different results? I don't know. No research I have seen has delved that deeply into those properties of dietary fats.