This is the same distinction as between running commands with bash -c (or just by executing a regular Bash script) and running them manually in an interactive Bash session. It’s pretty much an inherent feature of command-line interfaces that you can script them.

Wasn't intended to be a distinction but an aside.

But as to that, it's slightly different than merely being able to play back a recording of commands. It IS that, but that can be applied in a way that acts more like the examples I said like sed or patch, or expect, where the script can apply some funcion to different inputs, not just playing back a recording. I'm not denying the implimentation, how the job gets done, is technically still just a recording of commands.

It's different. Grep was a function of ed ('g/re/p') that was later extracted into its own program to search files that could not fit in memory. Sed then came along and implemented the 's/re/substitution/' functionality from ed for the streaming use case.