Above being Mahayana or Theravada, the idea of 84,000 paths is more likely to be about how a mix of Chinese whispers and eastern idiomatic uses of numbers caused (and still causes) misunderstandings in established traditions of Buddhism.
The figure was probably originally used to refer to the massive number of discourses the Buddha gave across the 45 years of his spiritual career, and which Venerable Ananda was able to recollect or confirm in the first times the early Sangha met to compile the Dhamma-vinaya left by the Blessed One.
We have already addressed this in previous threads:
