You still refer to logical decoding as part of recovery in the last section. The main point is that WAL by itself is designed only for data recovery and only contains information about what is going to be written where in terms of essentially raw disk accesses (notably, the writes do not have to be page aligned).

Logical decoding (which needs wal_level=logical which extends the WAL format with additional metadata) is about parsing the WAL for other purposes than performing the recovery (or physical replication, which is essentially the same thing as recovery, but performed on another instance of the same cluster). The name "logical decoding" is certainly intended to emphasize that there are other uses for that than logical replication, but these are not that different from logical replication on this level (get a stream of changed tuples in tables).