What the controversy left behind is a habit of reading, and it is the habit this part of the atlas is built on.
Three questions have to be kept apart. Did the thing happen? At what scale? And is the source that says so trustworthy? Collapsing them is how a figure invented by a conqueror becomes a statistic, and also how a well-evidenced practice gets waved away as colonial slander. Both errors are common and they are usually made by opposite parties in the same argument.
Applied across this material the three questions give different answers in each case. Mexica sacrifice happened, is established archaeologically, and the totals in the conquest narratives are unusable. Animal sacrifice in Vodou and in Lucumi happens, is sacramental, and is protected in law; human sacrifice in those traditions is a claim from a single trial with no record and from occupation-era popular writing. Sati happened, is documented in a colonial series that is genuinely hard to interpret, and its frequency before that series is unknown. The jauhar of Padmini is a literary narrative attached to a real siege.
None of that adds up to a single verdict about sacrifice accusations, and it is not supposed to. The point of separating the questions is that it makes it possible to say that a people did something terrible and that the person who reported it was lying about the numbers, at the same time, without either statement cancelling the other.