Richard, yes there can only be one route to a destination. If you put in a loop you create two, hence the hub and spoke arrangement. In your case the various switches are creating new hubs, each from a single spoke of their own so that’s fine. As you say, still only one route.
However as always these rules can be broken (or new ones created) but not with basic kit. I’ll not go into anything here as it can make your head hurt just thinking about it ? And of course we’re talking Ethernet, I used to run Token Ring networks which had to have a loop.
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