"F-35C has, for the last 5 years or so, been scheduled to only replace F/A-18A/B/C/D Hornets, not Super Hornets.
"The USN staked its bet on a UCAV only SH replacement some 5 years ago, and there was not supposed to be another manned carrier-fighter bought, but the USN has backed off this."
Not entirely correct.
The JSF has never been intended as the SH replacement, in part because IOC was originally planned to be only 11 years after the SH with deliveries completed in the early 2020s. On the other hand, the SH was never intended to be the C/D replacement, but this will begin to happen willy-nilly if production is continued.
I don't think that there is. or has ever been, a USN commitment to UCAV. Rather, when the J-UCAS program came apart in 2005-06, the Navy recognized that it could be used to demonstrate the principle of a CV-based unmanned stealth platform and persisted with X-47B.