[bigtechennui]

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.