Anattā in the Early Discourses: A Soteriological Method or A Metaphysical claim about reality?

In the early Buddhist discourses, anattā is primarily taught through an analysis of the five aggregates, showing that none of them can coherently be identified as a self. At the same time, the Buddha repeatedly declines to affirm either the existence or the non-existence of a self when questioned directly. This combination of analytic negation and doctrinal restraint raises a fundamental interpretive question about the status of the teaching. Should anattā be understood only as a soteriological method aimed at dismantling identity-view and attachment, without committing to a determinate ontological claim about reality? Or does it presuppose a view about the nature of reality that is deliberately left implicit in the early texts? How should the Buddha’s refusal to answer metaphysical questions about the self be understood: as a principled suspension of ontology, or as a pedagogical strategy shaped by the goals of the path? Furthermore, Do developments in the Theravada and Madhyamaka traditions represent faithful philosophical articulations of the early teaching, or do they mark a shift in explanatory aims and conceptual framework?