I'm wondering if there is a connection from the hallway that leads back to the bedrooms to that little room off the kitchen.

I notice sometimes you can see part of the kitchen set through the hallway that leads to the bedrooms from the living room. I dunno if it's just a set malfunction or if it's really supposed to connect. Also often you will see the girls enter the living room from the right hand side of the the hall way... to me that's a good indication there is a connection and they are coming in from the kitchen, otherwise they'd be coming in from Sophia's bedroom. I used to wonder why they always came in from Sophia's room, but it would make sense that they come from that direction if there's a connection and they're coming from the kitchen or entering from the back door.

However, I dunno why the girls didn't take that shortcut when they got up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen for a snack instead of walking all the way around through the living room

It was my understanding that the room adjoining the kitchen was the garage, which maybe widens where the kitchen ends. I'm not aware of it canonically connecting to the bedroom hallway, although I've seen screenshots where there were malfunctions with the set that were caught on camera (see below). I do know the rooms on the left side of the hallway are too small to actually exist, unless the rooms on the left are maybe a very narrow bathroom and a hall closet. They can be no more than five feet wide.

I was always under the impression that there was a little pantry or laundry room off the kitchen. I looked at a floorplan of the house once and it had the kitchen leading out into a small room, entitled "mud room" and the back door led out of that. But I noticed sometimes you could see a LITTLE ways into that room from the kitchen and it looked like it had furnishings similar to the kitchen, it had a white shelf in it like in the kitchen... the same one you can see from the living room in the hallway sometimes.

I almost feel like there would HAVE to be a connection... it would be a super tight squeeze between the kitchen and hallway... Of course the house in no way is built to scale.... there realistically could be no windows in the living room... as Rose's huge bedroom would take up that whole area where the windows are. Sophia's and Dorothy's bedrooms would cover the kitchen window.

I was always under the impression that there was a little pantry or laundry room off the kitchen. I looked at a floorplan of the house once and it had the kitchen leading out into a small room, entitled "mud room" and the back door led out of that. But I noticed sometimes you could see a LITTLE ways into that room from the kitchen and it looked like it had furnishings similar to the kitchen, it had a white shelf in it like in the kitchen... the same one you can see from the living room in the hallway sometimes.

I looked at some GG floorplans, and did see layouts very similar to what you describe. One actually has a little garden path (https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Girls-Floor-Plan-Floorplans/dp/B08FZDKHJY) that comes around the kitchen to that mud room, so the girls can actually get from the garage into the house. However, that same floorplan has a doorway leading directly from the garage into the kitchen, so I don't know why they wouldn't just take that door instead, so in my "perfect" GG floorplan, that second garage entry doesn't exist.

Of course, that floorplan also has another flaw: in the living room, the kitchen entry and the main entryway are across from one another, whereas in that diagram, they are not. I'm currently working on my version of the GG house layout, which I think should incorporate that mud room, for the girls' back exit to make any sense.