Not OP, but my take: When people talk about "CRUD" in the way you describe, they're usually talking about one of two separate (but related) things.
The "it's not _actual_ development" framing is usually directed at applications which "only" allow users to perform basic actions on some data, basically UIs for manipulating a database. It is absolutely real development (in my view), but less sexy than AI/ML, big data, etc, etc.
You are correct that every application (with some sort of data persistence) needs CRUD. But how CRUD is implemented, for better or for worse, depends on the requirements of the application storing the data. For (most) relational databases, the low-level "how do I CRUD" is well defined: standard SQL queries. But if I use NoSQL, or flat files, or something; it changes.
The definition of CRUD also varies depending on the layer of abstraction within an application or the perspective of the user/developer. For example: from a DBA's perspective, CRUD is SQL queries. From a UI, CRUD might be a JSON API or GraphQL endpoint. From a server-side application, CRUD might be a specific ORM library.
The "it's not _actual_ development" framing is usually directed at applications which "only" allow users to perform basic actions on some data, basically UIs for manipulating a database. It is absolutely real development (in my view), but less sexy than AI/ML, big data, etc, etc.
You are correct that every application (with some sort of data persistence) needs CRUD. But how CRUD is implemented, for better or for worse, depends on the requirements of the application storing the data. For (most) relational databases, the low-level "how do I CRUD" is well defined: standard SQL queries. But if I use NoSQL, or flat files, or something; it changes.
The definition of CRUD also varies depending on the layer of abstraction within an application or the perspective of the user/developer. For example: from a DBA's perspective, CRUD is SQL queries. From a UI, CRUD might be a JSON API or GraphQL endpoint. From a server-side application, CRUD might be a specific ORM library.