Yes, all of that is persistence storage.
When you boot, if you choose to use persistence storage by unlocking with password, etc, all your settings, installed app, etc get loaded from it. If you dont, the distro default is set.
If you have used Tails OS, its exactly that, except not hyper focused on anonymity and security requiring Tor to be running to access the network
It seems even I have many many many things to learn still