The point I was trying to make was just that linguistic distance doesn’t necessarily correlate with whether two things are considered distinct languages or merely dialects. There are languages less distinct from each other than Scottish and American English that are considered separate languages, and there are languages more distinct that Scots and English that are considered one language. “It’s the exact same language” isn’t always a useful ruler.

When I said

It’s a bit like if there was no Scots language, and the people in Scotland just still used runes to write but spoke the same language, except with even more old animosity fueled by previous governments.

I was referring to the state of serbo-croatian being similar to that imaginary situation. I understand that Scots is quite different from English, I wasn’t trying to erase the line between them, just to clarify that the amount of difference isn’t as straightforward as it sometimes seems.