Further to @prismatic-bell's really, really good addition on this post, but a little bit of a digression, because it deals with what canon intended versus whatever made it into the final publication.
I think the question of intent is really interesting in the discussion of canon. With any media, of course, but most especially with yugioh; not only is there the question of five zillion often-contradicting canons, but also there's a well-known narrative around YGO's publication. Takahashi was railroaded into making the manga about Duel Monsters, even though his original intention was to use plenty of different games. Takahashi was pressured into giving Kaiba a larger role because of his breakout popularity. Takahashi was very ill while writing the Memory World arc and didn't get to include everything, or tell the story as coherently as he wanted to.
This is a worthwhile conversation to have and there are many fascinating ideas to be mined from it, and I also think there's an inherent danger in assuming what Takahashi did want and basing our understanding of canon from that. A couple of examples:
Takahashi himself stated, in one of the manga forewords, "Until then, I had intended for the manga to continue in a one-shot format, however, I was running out of ideas, and I gave thought to trying out a larger story arc. That is why I tried to construct a story with the card game being the focus."
That doesn't sound, to me, like "I desperately wanted to keep doing one-shot games and was cruelly forced to pivot to Duel Monsters." So do we take Takahashi at his word for what he actually said in his own words - that he was running out of ideas and glad to pivot? Or do we cling to the narrative that he was "forced" because it gives legitimacy to a different sandbox many of us clearly want to play in?
Takahashi has also stated that he deeply regrets not being able to give Set and Kisara's story the space it deserved: "The story arc that was cut from my manga was the part about Kisara and Priest Seto and even now, I still have a lingering regret about that. As the readers would suspect, not only was it the story of the connection between modern-day Seto Kaiba and his Blue-Eyes White Dragon, it was also a very important part of the story."
I think it's worth asking ourselves why so much speculative energy is spent on "what could have been" when it comes to exploring the horror themes of the early manga, or even characters like Bakura; but it's considered a rare and niche form of fandom to speculate on Kisara and think about her importance to Seto and overall role in the story. Even when we have the creator right there saying 'there's more to this, this was very important to me and to the story, I regret this, I wanted to tell you more about it.'
So, at some point, I think "the creator probably intended this" or "this wasn't meant to be in the story" or "this WAS meant to be in the story" are kind of a zero-sum game, because in the end fandom will pick and choose from these narratives just like we pick and choose from canon itself, to suit whatever interests us and whatever the fandom wants to pursue. I actually don't think that's a bad thing! Like we don't HAVE to include a clearly not-intended mistranslation of the manga. But in a broader sense when talking about intent, I do think you can't use some of a creator's perceived intentions as a clobber, without looking at all of them.
