Okay, on second glance I appear to give undue weight to things with footnotes. https://www.nndb.com/people/607/000107286/

The reasoning in general makes sense, and the evidence they bring to bear re: Swift is somewhat convincing to me.

The main text of that entry appears to be a slightly-reworked version of the public-domain 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, but the Google Books image doesn't have the footnote you quoted. I'm guessing it's original to that NNDB site, which probably started with the encyclopedia like Wikipedia did.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Encyclopaedia_Brita...