> nitpick: often mistaken for globbing

What exactly would you call globbing if not the feature that is controlled using the nullglob, failglob, nocaseglob and dotglob options as well as the GLOBIGNORE variable.

Globbing has an ambivalent definition given that it’s mostly used for filename matches (especially given its origin as the glob command), but it’s really a specific form of pattern matching using wildcards such as * and ?, it need not apply only to filenames or paths on the filesystem: this matching is also used to match strings in case/in/esac constructs and test’s == !=

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Condition...

I guess one could say globbing is applying this pattern matching to filter a list.