As I understand it......there are various resistor, capacitor networks that are formed in a circuit both from actual circuit elements and parasitics.
Right !
These can give you two types of RC networks, those that give single pole response and those that are in the feedforward path and give a right half plane zero type response.
For real systems there will be no single pole response because of parasitic effects.
The single zero responses are the culprits that cause your phase to plunge towards -180 at higher frequencies. When phase tends towards -180 you get an unstable system because it means that a negative feedback is changing to positive feedback.
No, this effect will lead to instability only if the magnitude of the loop gain is > 0 dB at this 180-deg-frequency.
In fact that is why we might need to add some miller compensation, which is adding a RC in a some feedforward path, like from a gate to a drain to improve the phase at higher frequncies thus giving you phase margin to improve stability of the system.
No, it´s the wrong explanation. The Miller effect causes an additional pole which is dominant and shifts the phase at lower frequencies (principle of single pole response, but at the cost of a smaller bandwidth).