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Lincoln couldn’t have been more clear that he would protect slavery and even strengthen fugitive slave legislation. Slavery was not threatened.

We can debate part of that but is still doesn't change the fact that the Southern states seceded long before Lincoln was inaugurated and adopted a constitution that protected slavery to a far greater extent than the U.S. Constitution did, even had the Corwin Amendment been adopted. They were motivated to act out of a sense that their institution of slavery was threatened by the Lincoln election.

No they weren’t. Candidate Lincoln said numerous times he had no intention to threaten slavery and never said anything to the contrary. In fact he supported stronger fugitive slave legislation. Even if he intended to threaten slavery, he did not have the votes in Congress to do anything to threaten it.

Slavery simply was not threatened.

The John Brown raid and the followup convinced many people in the South that separation was a necessity regardless of any guarantees about slavery offered by the incoming Lincoln administration. Brown was funded by Gerrit Smith argueably the richest man in the US, he was supported by Ralph Waldo Emmerson, arguably the leading public intellectual and literary figure in the US. Following Brown's execution he was lionized throughout the North as more than a Hero but as literally a Christ like figure. The effect of John Brown's operation had it succeeded would have been an armed slave revolt and people in Virginia and the rest of the South only had to recall what Nat Turners’ rabble had perpetrated during its brief existence. Since a significant part of the population of the northern states seemed to applaud and approve of John Brown and his motivations and a large part of the northern intellectual establishment acted as a cheering section for Brown many Southerners deduced that there was no place for them in a federal union populated as it was by people that wanted them and their families murdered .

That, I think was the reason secession became seen as a necessity to survival throughout the South in 1860.