Yup - an important distinction that wasn't obvious to me when I first jumped in. LiveViews are very opinionated and generate a ton of boilerplate. Not always a bad thing, but Elixir is elegant because of how spartan and expressive the code is - LiveView is kind of the opposite IMO.
To be honest one of the reasons I don't like Phoenix is that even if I opt-out of LV in the generators, I still get a lot of LV code.