I occasionally use intermittent fasting for weight control, and the reason it works for me is because time-restricted eating makes it easy to consume less food. If I skip breakfast, and sometimes lunch, after a couple days I don't get hungry in the morning anymore, and I simply eat what I want the rest of the day, which ends up being significantly less.

I have had much less success with things like calorie counting and portion control. Those diets felt like constant self-denial, and I would inevitably end up fudging the numbers to allow myself to eat more, or would eventually just break down and binge.

So if your point is to say these numbers aren't that interesting because it's "really" just the caloric deficit doing the work here, I would say that could very well be right. But there are a lot of ways to get to a caloric deficit, and time-restricted eating has particular benefits over many of those methods.