"Model" is an overloaded term. In Domain-Driven Design there is the domain model at the centre of the application. One model consisting of many classes (entities and value objects), functions etc.

Then there's the ORM thing, particularly active record ORMs, where "a model" means a database table. And things like serialisation libraries (e.g. Pydantic) where "a model" is one type.

Something that changed how I thought of it was in Robert Martin's Clean Code where the says the whole MVC lives in the outer layers of the application. So basically, "model" is context specific. It depends what part of your application you're talking about. MVC is about building GUIs, that's it. An application usually consists of a lot more.

ORM is a good example of why OOP doesn't really work