Your explanation would make sense if there was any proof for dedicated servers handling the multiplayer gameplay. But historically there hasn't been a single Souls game that worked like that.
Dark Souls 2 does NOT use servers for the actual multiplayer gameplay. The "dedicated" servers are doing the matchmaking and there it ends.
I've been running wireshark besides the game for quite some time and my opponent and I are exchaning informations directly during the actual gameplay. The way the multiplayer gameplay works this has been the case for every souls game - they are all peer2peer titles and Fromsoft never stated otherwise.
There is even a running joke about "dedicated servers" for Dark Souls 2 because Fromsoft with bad translations advertised them. They added "dedicated servers" to Dark Souls 2 which are now doing the matchmaking. This was a problem in Dark Souls 1. The way the nodes work in Dark Souls is also peer to peer - they are basically a torrent-esque p2p way of letting clients interact with another to form player connections (not gameplay just the act of connection i.e. matchmaking).
I highly doubt that they switched it up for Dark Souls 3. There have been no news about it. Also dedicated server bring increased latency and unfair advantage to a single party into play (also additional cost). P2P is the standard for fast reaction-based games e.g. like Fighting Games and I see no reason for them to change it.
(Further one could assume that only the japanese servers are online so far. I've seen extremely stable, low latency fights between two US players. Either the US servers must be online, otherwise they had to connect to the Japanese server which make any form of PvP for American players unplayable.)