You can also say that the desk lamp in front of me is an illusion because if I take it into parts then there's no single atomic center that is truly the essence of the lamp.

That's how some Buddhist texts approach the question, typically with a horse cart or a wheel as the object they demonstrate lacks a fixed essence.

To which I say, sure, fine, there is no essence. There's still a table, a cart, a self! We don't need such essences. We don't need to be able to pinpoint the exact location or center of every entity we take to exist.

It is indeed interesting to look at edge cases and borders, like what happens to the self during states of deep meditative absorption, for example. Well, let's say it temporarily dissolves, like when you heat up a piece of wax. Maybe that's accurate, maybe not.

Buddhists do talk about the self like this, that it comes and goes, that settling into samadhi makes it calm down and fade into a more diffuse state, and so on. They also say that the self is ultimately an "illusion", but in the same sense that everything is an illusion: it is temporary, compounded, dependent, etc, while we sometimes are deluded to think otherwise, e.g. that our soul is eternal which is of course a common belief (that I do not hold).

Buddhists also always add that the teachings about "not self" are not to be taken as metaphysical claims, but as useful instructions for teaching a practice, the practice of meditation leading to liberation. Or in a lighter sense, you can practice having a less limiting self-definition, or to accept that your self is dynamic and expansive.

Still, people exist, and "self" is basically just a word I use to denote myself as a person. In my solitary flow states I am in a different state than in ordinary social situations; maybe I am a bit like a chameleon, too.

People are extremely complex and marvelous, so they exist in many different ways, within many different kinds of relations and environments, and they are constantly changing and adapting, but they are also constantly maintaining and preserving.

That's all a bit of a ramble, I didn't have time to organize these thoughts properly!

I enjoyed it. A bit hard to dive deeper in a HN thread. But your view doesn't seem that far from mine after all. Similar patterns just differently organized.