when i was a 14 (or even 12) year old amateur musician it was very obvious to me that DAW projects weren't audio files, I have never ever seen anyone saying this except your post across all my childhood friends who were dabbling with "artisanal" versions of FL studio, cubase SX, etc etc
The people I'm referring to were using GarageBand, MIDI, wav, mp3, and Musescore in the same kinds of sentences, and talked about converting between them. They also talked about importing into Sibelius and GarageBand. "Convert it [Musescore] to Sibelius" feels like it was about as common as "import the [Musescore] file into Sibelius". (And no, they hadn't heard of Lilypond.) Maybe I misunderstood what they meant. They were predominantly "play on an actual physical instrument"-type people, not tracker enthusiasts: without adult influence, perhaps two people present would have been using computer software at all. (Manuscript paper for everyone, except the one kid who only knew tab.)
Regardless, seems I'm the one with the uncommon use of language, here.
