Some authorities extend the map of the Hittite Empire all the way to the Aegean/Med shores of what we describe as southern Anatolia. It’s a convenient device to fill in areas which have no apparent separate identity.
Regarding the Sea Peoples, the question has always been their place of origin. We are pretty sure that the Mycenaeans would not have been identified by this appellation. Other theories have placed them as far away as the extreme Western Med or around Italy/Sicily.
This theory of a coordinated bunch of city states in that Anatolian region could finally place and make sense of the origins of the Sea People. Being a coastal people, they would have the requisite sea-faring knowledge to be rated as “Sea People.”
If the Hittites recognized them as a ‘people’ and not just one city, then I think the idea has some merit. You don’t have to have huge cities of stone to become sea raiders as the Vikings proved centuries later.
And in range of all the other civilizations they attacked, which is why the only graphical evidence we have of them is Egyptian murals.
If this theory is right, the Sea People may have been pushed to raiding other shores as the Hittites expanded into their area OR simply started raiding for goodies, realized it was profitable, and brought on the first world wide coalition to take out a terrorist state.
The Sea Peoples are a modern invention, used to wave away problems created by blind acceptance of the conventional pseudochronology.
There are two references to them in Egyptian contemporary records, which are misdated by centuries anyway. There are otherwise no ancient references to them anywhere.
They left no characteristic pottery, no geographic traces, no towns, no tombs, no distinctive burials, no characteristic armor, no characteristic weapons, identifiable rulers (including conquerors of the lands they supposedly conquered) or king-lists, no written records in their own right, no coins, and perhaps most significantly, no wrecks -- the last one being pretty damned peculiar for a massive group of seagoing conquerors. :')