Alignment is a very broad term. True, it encompasses things like censorship and mandatory refusals in areas people will never agree 100% on, but a completely-unaligned LLM would be next to useless. When the system prompt tells the model, "You are a helpful assistant," that's alignment.

Well if we are going to be broad enough about "alignment" to just mean training that makes it practically useful, then yeah, it's a flawed premise and people are wasting their breath talking about it at all. It's basically broad enough that it means nothing