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I got through most of this but does anyone know why McCarthy famously hated punctuation marks and only, "believed in periods, capitals, and the occasional comma"?

Everyone makes a big deal of it but is it really just preference or is the idea deeper, that like a all the meaning should be contained in the words anyway and punctuation is a shortcut?

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His wildest choice to me is using “could of” etc. I get it’s for pronunciation purposes, but now that it seems on its way to replace the correct spelling, it really jarred me.

Wild? Using it in dialogue seems perfectly reasonable. It's a common malapropism.

Even in dialogue I would've expected "could've". 'Could of' reads more like a typo

It's phonetically identical or very near it in most dialects. If anything it's a transcription error, but in this case just a way to imply the spoken cadence of a certain accent. Not any more incorrect than spelling "going to" as "gonna" in dialog.

Very often it's not a malapropism, just a variation on pronounciation.

It's not even that, they're pronounced the same in most dialects. It's either a transcription error or an atypical spelling depending on the intent of the author. It doesn't represent a different meaning or pronunciation in speech.

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