Instruction pipelining is literally a form of instruction-level parallelism. To argue it's not parallelism is a weird take.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipelining

Your argument basically amounts to forming an arbitrary definition of "unit" that consists of the whole thing so that then you can state that there is no parallelism. By that token, an 8-core processor has no parallelism because it can only execute a single package of 8 threads at any given time.