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Casterly Rock is an entire mountain, so melting it all with dragonfire is something Valyrians in canon don't seem to have the ability to do. The real way to take it down w/ dragons is to fill it with smoke and either kill all the defenders via lack of air or force them to surrender.

Martin's analogue seems to have been the Saxon conquest of England, though that was a lot more of an outright displacement than most other conquests.

The Conquest of Mexico is an interesting analogy, because most of the native elites who sided with the Spanish against the Aztecs did just what you said - they converted, intermarried with the Spanish nobility, and retained their positions, with the Viceroy slotting in where the Aztec Emperor...

Most "conquests" in history are just a case of elite transfers of power, so we can presume this was the case in Westeros as well. FWIW asw., we're presuming the official histories of the great houses (which remember, are supposed to be an in-universe document) put forth by themselves are...