Excess Mortality is a tool used to attribute deaths to _the pandemic_. It is helpful for answering questions like "How well is <country> handling the Pandemic?" and for comparing performance between countries and comparisons over time.
Imagine a parallel universe, where COVID-19 is actually just a flu, but for some reason the oppresive governments execute anyone who says so. In the parallel universe, they also have excess mortality (because of the executions) during 2020. So you cannot use the mere fact of excessive mortality to prove that we do not in fact live in this parallel universe.
It is not "conflating". That's the actual point of the exercise here. It's asking, how would things have been had there not been a pandemic? How much impact did the pandemic have on the society, in TOTAL, OVERALL.