tl;dr -
From my experience talking and traveling with others, there isn’t a hard-and-fast set of rules to being vegan. I guess you could call it a spectrum.

For instance, some vegans will swear that any leather product whatsoever is bad; others would argue that leather products made decades ago are fine because they’ve already been made and you’re simply doing the reuse/recycle thing and not letting it go to waste.

Another example is honey: there are ethical ways to extract honey from hives that helps the hive in some ways, and not-so-good ways that end up killing large swathes of bees. As a result, some vegans swear any honey is bad, but others will disagree and be OK with it under strict circumstances.

From my perspective, it’s all about who you support with your wallet, which extends now beyond just animals but to nature as a whole, in terms of what the companies we buy from do with their profits. Even reaching to topics like gen AI and how the capitalists are extracting resources for their models. There are ways to train models that don’t steal other peoples’ work, etc. I’m against the big players shoving down our throats, but I’m not opposed to training a model on public domain works, or even a pool of my own work, and then utilizing local generation as a form of automation based on how I like to do things.

I also take a pretty staunch health stance against eating animal proteins just because of factory farming, but if I were to be a refugee living in the woods I wouldn’t be against hunting and killing a small and rapidly reproducing animal like a rabbit to survive (so long as I’m doing everything from the kill to field dressing, etc.). I will avoid it as long as I have other methods to get the nutrition my body needs, though.