Is "ETL vs ELT" just "tables vs views"?
No.
What you describe are all variants of ELT.
The difference between ETL and ELT is in where you do the &quot;T&quot;. The &quot;traditional&quot; ETL flow would implement the &quot;T&quot; (data transformation) outside the DBMS, using a specialized tool like DataStage, Informatica, Talend, etc. The data transformed to the target model would then be simply loaded into the destination DBMS tables.
The ELT flow differs in that it is the destination database engine that performs the &quot;T&quot;; you load raw data into staging tables in the target database, then use the DBMS tools to &quot;massage&quot; them into the final form and copy to the destination tables. It is an appropriate alternative when the source and target data type impedance is relatively low and the DBMS in question has the tools and capacity to do the job.