I would suggest that you start proving your version of things and stop making lame excuses that "refraction did it" and "you need to do x for me." We already know that refraction does anything that you don't like, in your poor attempt at justifying contradicting evidence.
But refraction
does do it, Tom.
Refraction is easily shown in a lab, and the atmosphere refracts in exactly the same way we would expect from experiments. It's hard to predict exactly, of course, especially over long ranges, as there are so many variables, but we can say generally when it will be at a maximum. That's partly why flat earth experiments carried out over frozen lakes, for example, are so laughable - they are being conducted over precisely the kind of conditions you would want if you were trying to maximise refraction.
Things disappear over the horizon as they get more distant in exactly the way we would expect them to with our round earth and the atmosphere behaving as it does. I have yet to see a single video with anything in it that can't be explained by a round earth and a refractive atmosphere. I have also yet to see a single video with a ship, or other distant object, partially obscured from the bottom up, brought back into full view via a zoom lens or other magnifying device. The video in the wiki (
https://wiki.tfes.org/Sinking_Ship_Effect_Caused_by_Limits_to_Optical_Resolution) shows a boat that is quite clearly not on the horizon - there is visible sea beyond it. And the 'home experiment' is a total joke - that's just an eyesight test. It has nothing to do with perspective at all.