It does seem questionable whether straight line trajectories are prevalent in nature. It's mainly the RE theory where I've heard that.
I think you are overcomplicating things with your quotes and references. At a level which impacts our daily lives, light travels in a straight line from the Sun to the Earth, in rays that are as near as makes no difference to our daily lives, parallel. This one factual observation accounts for plenty of things we see with our own two eyes and can measure with simple equipment. I see this a lot with FET - when something cannot be explained, reams of pseudo-science and interpretation get thrown at it.
Yes, light does bend, but not in the way FET and EA supposes. Refraction is something most school children are taught, and while they may not understand the underlying physics and actual quantum effects, they can see with their own two eyes that light bends when it passes through things with different refractive indices. A vacuum (i.e. space) has a refractive index of 1.00000, air has an average refractive index of 1.00029 at STP, and water is 1.333. As you can see, light is hardly affected by air relative to a vacuum. However, STP does vary in the atmosphere, so...
The refraction coefficient of our atmosphere has an average of k=0.17. This means that light is ever so slightly curved TOWARDS the surface of the Earth, not away from it as EA would have you think. The closer you are to the ground, the lower the temperature, the more k increases to the point that light can follow the curvature of the Earth for hundreds of miles. However, once you are a few meters above the ground, the effect is negligible as the density gradient gets less and less. For EA to be correct the Earth would need an average refraction coefficient of -1. This is not the case. Even on a flat Earth, light would still curve towards to the surface at low altitudes due to the same density gradient.
The impact of atmospheric refraction is very well known and understood, with plenty of actual science and mathematical models to back it up. The theory of EA has never, ever been observed or shown to be a true effect in nature, and sill relies on an unknown force pulling or pushing light away from the surface and doing a U-bend back into space.
As for the whole thing about shifting constellations and the fact that we observe counter-rotation in one hemisphere to the other, all of that is explained elegantly in RET. In FET it needs perspective and other "anti-rotation of stars" theories, where I can't find anything else anywhere on the internet to back up such theories and claims.