I get it. I won't say you're wrong. I'm just basing what I'm saying off his letters where for some of the more obvious allegories and parallels he was really dismissive and was like "don't know where you're getting that from, I was just using my imagination"

The real discussion is which is true:

• his imagination needed him to explore his traumas
• he was actively dismissive in communiqué of the idea that he was exploring horrifying things because he didn't have it in him to have that conversation with the public once the books were published
• it was both. He didn't actively mean to do it, but he got where people were drawing the parallels, but he wasn't equipped to explore those parallels.

Personally, as much as people of that generation did erase their own experience, I think he was being genuine in his letters when he said "I wasn't trying to do that, don't know why you'd think that" when what he experienced shook him so deeply to his core that it needed an outlet, and that outlet became his imagination. But I see validity in all the ways of seeing it, except to take him at his word and dismiss that LotR was influenced by an industrial war that felt like it completely destroyed the world

He based Mordor on the heavily industrialized north of England and the shire on the idyllic south (Kent, where he grew up). So the ecological themes of the books are very much based on the times Tolkien lived in, consciously or subconsciously.