[cthalupa]

This is largely an issue of definition. When Tolkien spoke of disliking allegories, he was largely referring to the medieval tradition - https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/an-allegory-is-not-the-sam... - where you are quite explicitly making a direct connection to a specific thing.

He did, however, love to speak of "applicability," which many people would call allegory today. The One Ring, for example, is clearly meant to to embody power and the temptation of it/addiction to it. This is pretty unambiguously true! What Tolkien didn't want was for people to view The One Ring as some specific embodiment of power, e.g. the atomic bomb, and instead for readers to draw parallels to their own lives, experiences, and knowledge. To him, this was "applicability," but in the modern discussion of literature this sort of thing would still often be called an allegory.