A few basic questions about simple electric circuits
I can see that this is going to be like the three blind men describing an elephant &mdash; each response is going to emphasize a particular detail, and it's going to be difficult to get a good understanding of the underlying principles. But here goes...

Yes, your understanding of the low-level physical details of what happens in a DC circuit is correct, but that's way too much detail for everyday circuit analysis.

Instead, we generally do a simplified analysis using lumped circuit elements, and ignore the effects associated with the charging and discharging of circuit nodes. This is the basis of Kirchoff's voltage and current laws.

AC analysis is simply a matter of allowing the value of the voltage (or current) source(s) to vary with time. This still ignores the wiring effects, but now you need to account for the reactive properties of actual capacitors and inductors in the circuit.