This feels like a semantics back and forth. Call it compound growth then. It's the same concept. This applies to all yielding assets. You can call it divs / buybacks for stocks and interest for bonds, but it's the same thing / effect.
Compounded interest is reliable, even boring. You know exactly what you'll have at any moment in time.
Your ten-year index returns are reasonably reliable, historically. But your 2007-2009 returns aren't your 2016-2018 returns, at all.
They're different concepts and deserve to be conceptualized differently, especially in the modern era, where interest rates on Treasure are lower than inflation.