Cisco Switch Stacking Principles

Hi everyone!

New to the subreddit, am hopeful a Cisco veteran out there can help.

So I'm working on a rather large 3-tier Cisco network for a client, and I've done a fair chunk of research into Cisco's current DNA licensing scheme thus far. We have about 80 x Catalyst 9300 access switches in total, and have designed to have 2 x 10G SFP+ uplinks for each switch (redundancy and all that). I was under the impression that with StackWise 480 architecture, stacking cables are required, and that it is possible to use only two uplinks per stack, and not two per switch. We would have gone for 2 x 25G SFP28 uplinks to the stack master and the next-in-line in this case, to accommodate the bandwidth required by the total number of ports in the stack. Thing is, we were told by a Cisco rep that it's not possible for, say, a stack of four switches to share uplinks to the distribution layer, even if the transceiver speed is high enough to accommodate the bandwidth required by the end-users for those switches, and that stacking just allows a single administrative interface for a number of switches. So we went with the point-to-point uplinks-per-switch design for our budget. Fine, I reckoned that trusting the Cisco guy was the best bet since the documentation is so convoluted and I'm a newbie.

The same Cisco rep told us that if we went with the DNA advantage licenses, it would be possible to stack the access switches virtually (no stacking cable required) with StackWise Virtual. This conflates with what I've come across in my own research - it sounds to me like StackWise Virtual is mainly meant for the distribution and core layers, and it's not possible to do with 9300s, even with the DNA Advantage licenses. Can someone either confirm or deny the advice from this Cisco dude? I'm beginning to think that either we're not communicating properly, or we're being taken for a ride.

Any advice would be appreciated!