Great, carefully reply. This point

"Our comparative models making us think two very different things are similar (do not underestimate this)."

Is really insightful, a lot of very poor history is based on people picking up seeming similarities and turning them into theories - notably that awful Netflix shows.

Then the next issues is assuming that things that were genuinely shared meant the same thing even in the new context - when the act of translation changed the meaning

It's very possible. There are lots of records of the various rulers sending each other both the raw materials they depended on for their economies as well as the prestige goods they used to demonstrate their superiority and right to rule.

The west to east trend only seems to be true because most of the people in the east were the ones writing. Could have been people going the other way too but because there are fewer sources it creates the impression that there wasn't.

As for period, the turbulence went on for a much longer period than that. Take Crete - the Minoans suffered several palatial destructions in the 2-300 years before the 'final' collapse in 1200BC, including the invasion/transition into Mycenaean culture. The same is true across the board. There may have been a cluster around the 'end' of the bronze age, but considering how hard it is to date things cohesively, these could have been generations apart and represent totally different events.

This map is not in any way authoritative, it's guesswork. For example, no one knows who the 'sea people' were or if they were even one group at all rather than lots of bands of different displaced people.

Most evidence suggests that there was not a lot going on in central Europe at this point. All the big empires were in the south or East of the med, and these empires were highly interconnected and interdependent (like the modern world). Thus catastrophic events like famines, eruptions (Thera) or political collapse in one place might have been amplified and taken down the others. It's called system collapse.

That said, we really don't know a lot about this period. Gaps in the material record could be hiding anything. The theory I explain above is simply the most likely based on the incomplete evidence we have.

EDIT: Plus 'collapse' is a weird concept considering it happened over hundreds of years. Generally, there was a decline, but it's very hard to pin it to a single cause when it happened over such a long period.