No, you do. Everything I am saying is taken straight from GR textbooks--mainly Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler (1973) and Wald (1984)--and peer-reviewed papers, such as Hawking's original paper on black hole evaporation. You need to go read them.

> In GR, spacetime isn't just an "optical device" that delays rays cast in an absolute reference.

I never said it was. The paths of light rays in GR are determined by the geometry of spacetime. "Optical illusion" is one way of trying to describe the effect of that in the case under discussion. But the effect is there regardless of what you call it.

> In relativity, the behavior of light rays is actually closely related to interpretation of time and space. You can't separate the two.

This is just another way of saying that the paths of light rays in GR are determined by the geometry of spacetime. Which is true, but to figure out what that means in a specific scenario, you need to properly understand the spacetime geometry in that scenario. You evidently do not.

> In fact, the definition of (relative) local time is given exactly by the rate a "light clock" ticks when communicating periodically to a "light clock" located elsewhere.

There is a limited set of scenarios in which this works, but that limited set does not include the case under discussion (Alice falls into a black hole while Bob remains far away). In general in GR, there is no well-defined way of comparing "times" for spatially separated observers. The only well-defined time is local--proper time along a particular observer's worldline.

> Alice falls into BH -> Alice approaches EH -> Alice's BH evaporates -> Alice finishes falling into the BH

I never said that was the sequence of events. It isn't. The correct sequence of events is (note: this is what happens to Alice, Bob does not see all of these events--see my other post in response)

Alice falls into BH -> Alice approaches EH -> Alice finishes falling into BH -> Alice's BH evaporates

If you don't understand how that happens, you need to go study GR textbooks. The model that gives the sequence of events I just described has been well understood for several decades now--Hawking published the first paper using it in the 1970s.