The interesting question is not whether Padmini existed. Most historians have rejected the historicity of the narrative, on the straightforward ground that the people who were present at the siege do not mention her and the first person who does was writing in 1540 in a genre that was not reporting.
The interesting question is how a Sufi allegory turned into a national historical memory. Ramya Sreenivasan followed exactly that, tracing how the story was rewritten between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries by successive interests: Rajput courts establishing lineage and honour, bardic and monastic communities, colonial administrators collecting native history, and nationalist writers who needed an indigenous heroism to set against conquest. Each retelling adjusted the emphasis, and each was inherited by the next as fact.
The stakes are current rather than antiquarian. The narrative remains politically live in India, and disputes over its representation have produced organised protest and violence within the last decade. That is a reason to be exact rather than a reason to be quiet.
The exactness the atlas can offer is a separation of claims. That the siege occurred is attested by a witness. That jauhar was a Rajput practice is attested independently of this story. That Padmini led one at Chittor in 1303 is not attested by anything contemporary and is rejected as history by most scholars, which is a different statement from saying nothing of the kind ever happened at any fort.