Yup, its true. And you are able to manipulate your town with it too while you plot reset.
Place down paths to where you think the villager will plot. And plot reset the next day. If the house didn't plot where you wanted it, you missed a spot. Use your 3DS clock to fix that problem and rinse and repeat until you got it.
I can also confirm this based from personal experience. I was expecting for a random move in to come today so I've made several 3x3 spaces then put paths on everything. I restarted around 20-30 times (until I got what I wanted) and each time, they would only place their plot in one of those spaces. Very convenient haha
Yes and no
I've tested it out and while they will move into spaces that you designate paths around, if there is no available spaces, they will move on top of patterns. This happened to me twice during replotting by accident. I set down patterns all over my map and closed all the 3x3 spaces except for where I wanted them to move in but had my spaces too close to edges where houses don't spawn and they spawned randomly elsewhere on the map. Don't be like me and miscalculate the space and they won't move in on your patterns C:
I know this will sound crazy...but how do you start laying out these paths? Do you edge the entire town and put horizontal and vertical paths every 3 spaces? Or do you block out entire town and just open random 3x3 spaces?