Thinking of CoreData as simply providing the persistence layer is incorrect. It also provides the schema. CoreData’s object graph management and persistence are

Thinking of CoreData as simply providing the persistence layer is incorrect. It also provides the schema. CoreData’s object graph management and persistence are separate - you can use CoreData without persistence, but you can’t use it without a schema. The annotations are for defining the CoreData schema – i.e. the necessary piece – rather than relying on a schema definition file as one would prior to SwiftData. There are additional syntactic niceties for SwiftUI binding, but the annotations are very much an ORM.