Not always. The most common counter example is beta features which customers opt into, controlled by the product team. It's too early for that to be part of the license, especially because pricing often hasn't been decided yet.

But there's also a surprisingly common situation with big customers who want to limit and control certain UI updates so they can ensure that employees are trained appropriately.

What's the difference? Either way you're turning on and off code that's already in the application. The only difference I can immediately see is that some people do feature flags as being on or off for the entire application instance, but I'm pretty sure you can do A/B testing with them at arbitrarily fine granularity and still count as a feature flag.

There are many different types of toggles of functionality. Not all of them are enabling code features. Well, they are but the why they are is what is at issue.

But it's all the same code under the covers. The functionality of what is enabled encoded into a license key - that's the same type of functionality as "does this deployment allow people to sign up by email" or "has this deployment enabled the super secret power user test functionality?"

But that's all under "if dataSource.toggle then {something}"

https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html