If a wiki points you to all the buffs and tells you where to find them it completely invalidates the challenge.
There's like, five buffs in the whole game and none of them "invalidates" the challenge whatsoever. You are droning on this nonsense without understanding how any of this works and pretending even the most brain dead normie doesn't know how to find those supposed mythical "buffs" and wouldn't use them when found, without the "wiki".
It's an argument so stupid, so incredibly ignorant and inane it invalidates everything else you may have to say about the game.
I also didn't skip the boss with "buffs". If anything my approach was kinda gimped. The guy with the dual katanas got the boss down to 45% of health and he didn't even play that well. With the Flame Art infusion the Great Stars could only rely on its own innate bleed proc rate, which is fairly low (around 55). Also while Lion's Claw does massive damage it doesn't seem to do a whole lot of posture damage. Great Stars is also a strike weapon where as the boss is weak to piercing (which is why the "pros" all use poke weapons). It's also a slow weapon which wasn't ideal for such a fast boss and wasn't ideal to maximize bleed procs.
Lastly, my stat spread is unoptimized and thus i didn't actually maximize the damage potential of the weapon. Ongbal, who used a similar approach to mine, took basically around the same time except, given he did it as SL1 i should have been a lot faster, which shows my approach wasn't completely optimal.
In all of this, the damage boost i got from those very standard buffs i used was relatively unimportant. Golden Vow gives you 15% extra damage for 80 seconds, while Howl of Shabriri does 25% extra damage with a whopping 30% extra damage taken for a meager 40 seconds. I also actually lost some good damage by not switching to Misericorde for the critical hit because i had to chase the bleed proc.
What made my "burst" successful is not the damage i did but the fact i was able to maintain a steady stream of hits. What made it possible was my ability to master the first phase to the point i could just hammer at him without interruptions. Both the posture and bleed meters can go down quite fast if you don't keep the hits coming. This applies to all the "pros" out there. It's not the "buffs" nor the "colossal" weapons it's their mastery of the boss which allows them to keep the hits coming until the bosses fold prematurely.