HD wallet advanced questions

Found an amazing post on HD wallets, which I recommend for anyone else interested: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/70017/can-someone-explain-the-meaning-of-derivation-path-in-wallet-in-plain-english-s

However, I do have some follow-up questions:

1. Would a person be able to know, based off of the public key / eth wallet address, that m/44'/60'/0'/0'/0, m/44'/60'/0'/0'/1, m/44'/60'/0'/0'/2.. are connected in anyway?

2. I don't understand how this is hierarchical (HD). Presumably, m/44'/60'/0'/0'/0 is your "root" wallet, and m/44'/60'/0'/n'/ wallets are the "node" wallets, if were picturing a tree structure. Everyone seems to imply the "root" wallet always takes precedence over all node wallets (ie. root wallet's funds are the sum of all node wallets). But really all this seems to be is that they share the same seed, right? Couldn't this really be thought of as "a bunch of wallets derived from the same seed phrase, but otherwise not related in any way"? "Hierarchical" seems misleading if I'm not understanding.

3. If I were to use a key phrase to generate a private key/public key/eth address, and send funds to that eth address, I could go on MetaMask and type in the key phrase and log in to see my funds that were sent to it. But I've only ever tried this with the root wallet m/44'/60'/0'/0'/0. How would this work for `m/44'/60'/0'/0'/1?

Thanks!