Yep. That’s why this is a potentially useful rule of thumb for comparing programming languages, especially ones that skew very far in one direction or the other, but it’s not a rigorous definition of the concepts.

Some incredibly simple algorithms are difficult to explain naturally without it sounding like control flow. How would you describe the absolute value function without saying “if” or “when” or specifying one particular element from a set? Obviously any computer system needs to be able to determine what steps to take depending on specified conditions.