I don't take them as gospel, no. They're still fallible. All I know is that Vergeben's claims of there being a SE character and Minecraft content can be verified. I'll take quotes they've said that are verified as true, but any future claims, I still take with a grain of salt.
Of course.
But for the "right" things. Know that it's not
"I get the license for Geno and I can do what I want with him"
Or
"I got Sonic's right I can do anything!"
Characters right aren't like real-life rights. Characters rights often follow a "Character Bible" that force the party who buy said licence to follow it strictly.
That Bible is what force Sonic and Pac-Man to be absolutely Blue and Yellow no matter what pallette swap.
The Sonic/Pokemon Characters Bible leaked a few years ago for Exemple.
As for "Does buying X Characters rights allow me to do anything with them even if I follow the Bible?"
No. In the end, EACH type of use have it's sort of deal. The most famous one I can think of right now is
>Who framed Roger rabbit. Each cameo of each company was almost basically choosen by the company owner, and they all had to have the same screentime/dialogue as the rival company.
>Wreck-it Ralph for the use of each video games Characters, they needed the "OK" to see if it was fine to use it in X scenes.
> Disney allowing Nomura to use Mickey for ONE scene for KH1 when they didn't fully trusted him at all
I can also assure you that if we didn't see Cloud appears in ANY CGI or get Thanos'd in the cutscenes of World of Light is because Square-Enix Probably didn't gave them the right to use Cloud for CGI videos and probably never would let him get anihilated.
But yeah, basically, each type of use is a different kind of deal and licence to pay.
Mii costume? A deal
Trophy/Spirit? A deal
Music? A deal
Fighters? Another deal and even if some artistical liberties can be taken, there is still strict rules to follow
That's why people talking about the Mii costume and now the Spirit icon never made any sense to me. It even hurt his chance more since it means that Square-Enix allowed the licence for this but probably 100% said no as a Fighters.