Your sequencing narrative is likely plenty correct . . . though I wouldn’t say “known.”
Just be at a Pentecostal special meeting where Holy Spirit moves in very persistent dramatic power and miracles.
Watch then, how the faithful treat the servant of God through whom Holy Spirit has moved.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all that SOME around the time of the early church would humanly elevate Mary in a list of ways.
Doesn’t mean God did.
And, as we have seen, as late as 1940’s . . . such elevation was still being . . . embellished, added to etc.
That fact alone indicates to me the level of nonsense involved.
Yes, it’s still ongoing, although I don’t think it’s nonsense. But it is true that it needs careful monitoring, and this is what the Church has done that throughout the ages.
The figure of Mary is very attractive, and while the reality, IMHO, is quite sufficient, there are people who seem to feel the need to go beyond that into their own special Marian world. This may be real; or it may be wishful or even ideologically motivated thinking. I remember the awful Veronica Lukens of Queens, whose followers would go around sticking bizarre tracts under the windshield wipers of unfortunate New Yorkers.
Apparitions of the Virgin are always carefully examined: Fatima, Lourdes and Guadalupe, for example, were deemed to be real after years of serious investigation and challenges from Church authorities. At the same time, there have been many “apparitions” that have been completely rejected by the Church, and others where the faithful have been told to proceed with great caution and which are not approved by the Church for formal devotion, pilgrimages, etc. (such as Medjugorje).
It’s a very delicate matter.