Sidenote, i'm in your camp and agree with you - BUT, hypothetically there's a side to this i've not seen discussed here. That you can lose sleep and it causes a weight gain, with no other change to your CI or CO. Notably, you were previously not processing a portion of your potential CI and it was just passing through you.

In that case you didn't change how much you ate or how many calories passed your lips, but you did change your CI by way of changing your sleep.

Is this a real example or a contrived edge case from a software dev? No clue. I'll let better minds decide that hah.