From the experimenting people have done, the paths-blocking-houses thing does sound fully legit. People have covered everything except for the exact amount of space needed to place a house and that's where the villager moved in, which sounds good enough to me.
I always avoided making a path in my town because it could just get arbitrarily ruined so that news got me to finally just make some path tiles and throw them down. Only made one so far just to make sure everything could get blocked out properly like I wanted it to and need to make like 2 or 3 more for visual variety now and redo the path so it's not all samey. Need to pick up a new axe tomorrow so hopefully one of those is in the store, went through my whole existing one.
And my in-game 3DS and Wii U come in the mail tomorrow, hooray for puzzles and islands