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Notes -
I would not call it at the core, generally.
I mean, take Dwarf Fortress. Of course, you have CRUD on savegames, but the purpose of DF is not to create savegames. If you squint your eyes hard enough, you might also find CRUD in-game (make crafts, look at crafts, encrust crafts with gems, sell crafts). Or even any work with OOP objects. But looking at the game through that lens seems rather artificial. I might as well look at a computer through the lens of gates or RTL.
Or take something completely different, Google maps. There is certainly CRUD involved somewhere. The client reads (and displays) map data. It sends information on traffic back to Google. It also might request a route, which I guess you could model as creating an route_request object, which then gets resolved by the server (reading data on traffic in turn) and returned as a route object (which can then be updated by the server as traffic conditions change). CRUD would be involved for certain, but more like cellular respiration is involved in a human flirting with another. You are unlikely to learn much of interest for the outcome by looking at mitochondria performance (unless one of the participants has an abnormally high blood concentration of cyanide ions).
If I want to build a Google maps clone, the CRUD would be the easy part. There are protocols for that. The interesting part is all the rest -- in what format is your map data, how do you use it for routing and for displaying and so forth.
I will grant you that some B2B applications are indeed mostly CRUD, though. If you have a company internal procurement system which displays items from an external vendor, and lets a user place orders with the vendor, then that may well be just a thin layer gluing two APIs to each other. Just like sometimes mammals might primarily engage in cellular respiration and do little else.
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