Thinking Clearly about Association Studies (Risk Factors and Causal Salad included)

In the provided paper by Kezios, she differentiates thourougly between causal (also active prediction) and prediction (also passive prediction). I read the introduction and Reflections as an agreement with my view. Would what I call descriptive fall under passive prediction? What do you think about the idea to mentally downgrade everything that’s only talking about association as descriptive? And would you push against association studies that claim their goal was to assess “the association between X1 and Y (and then some adjustment set)” given they’re likely misaligned?