At a very abstract level, maybe. But it's common not to log changes that can trivially be rolled back, like insertions into a table that was created or truncated within the transaction. Of course, such optimizations are incompatible with log-based replication. So the statement should probably be, “in a system with log-based replication, the log is authoritative, and the tables are just an optimization”. This framing also avoids ambiguities because a transaction log may not be fully serialized, and might not fully determine table contents.