Do IVs affect heroes' maximum stats?

Online guides state that IVs impact your chance to gain stats on level up. That is, each character has a range of IVs which impact their chances of rolling well when leveling up.

Stats can also be increased by merging characters.

Does this mean that the advantage of high-IV characters can be overcome by merging lower-IV characters? This would imply that all versions of the same character have the same potential, just a different amount of effort to get there. Is this true?

Solution 1:

No, the higher-IV character will be able to receive the same stat bonuses from merging, thus, two characters that have merged the maximum number of times (10) will have the same bonuses, with the higher-IV character having the same advantage as before. This is explained in this thread:

You can merge up to a maximum of "+10". At Lv40, each merge gives 2 stat points. At "+10", you always end up with 4 extra points in each of the 5 stats.