your theory is correct. in deerington milk acted like she wrote everything while simcha was just a helper mod. in reality simcha was writing all of the tdms and a lot of the events. but because milk wrote the "important" stuff (read: the boring npc info dump events and the bloated game info) it was her game. simcha did even more work in deer country and milk took even more credit for it. and then when milk left everyone started to fret and fuss about how they weren't sure the game would make it with the pillar of the mod team missing. when again simcha was doing the lion's share of the mod work and had been for years at that point.

deer country closing was always entirely about milk. but even people that claim to hate her are completely taken in by her public persona. which is why they're spinning conspiracy theories so they can blame literally anyone except her.