Adding more to questioning early Ami's awareness toward resets
But let's forget about that too. This is a very good starting point for me to express just how shaky speculation about “Ami has always been Ami Prime” really is to me; not via entry points like "awareness of fuckery" or "knowledge of resets" like you did there, but just via "personalities", my sole struggle in believing the said speculation.
Sure, Ami is the queen of the unhinged, creepy, and lore-heavy; always has been. But at the same time, back in Ch1, she was predominantly, consistently just a sweet and genuine airhead, especially towards her friends.
With every scene you find Ami being suspicious of something during your Nth playthrough, comes 10 other scenes that would suggest otherwise but go unnoticed. Even if she gradually becomes more maniacal and unexplainable as story progresses, early Ami's personality is still in such a big contrast when compared with just how full-blown vicious Ami Prime is. To demonstrate, I hand picked a few moments to pose as a challenge for all that believes “Ami has always been Ami Prime”.
All of these moments revolve around Maya to a certain extent deliberately to make a contrast to how Ami Prime's been treating Nu Maya, and
the challenge itself is that you have to look at these moment and convince yourself "yuuuup this is definitely Ami Prime in disguise. 100%. She's lying and hiding I can totally see it.". While concealing her presence from Maya Prime sounds quite possible and hardly far-fetched, this would mean that I inadvertently have to believe that
early Ami is Ami Prime despite the former not showing cosmic knowledge, fuckery awareness, and mostly importantly not showing the off-the-chart toxicity of the latter. The difference there is so large that they might as well be different people. Isn't this why we distinguish Nu Maya from Maya Prime in the first place?
Anyway, this is my biggest reason why I hesitate about embracing the speculation of Ami Prime being always there, and it's because such a speculation is an interesting yet not-so-perfect puzzle piece that fits some corners of the puzzle but not all corners. I can't rely solely on takes on supernaturally freaky moments to commit to "early Ami == Ami Prime", while ignoring feelings these cute slice-of-life moments give me. I think slipping in-n-out of her other alt selves does make some sense: Ami perhaps is the same as her mother, susceptible to many sounds, things, everything; it's just one of things is her ultimate evil self from another timeline from a long long time ago. At least, this is one of the potential solutions that isn't comprehensive yet also isn't contradicting much of anything, as now we just need to think about "when the slipping takes place and by what" rather than "how the fuck would Ami Prime act so sweet back then".