The Postgres project is famously bad at naming things. It turns out that VACUUM should have been called "accelerated database recovery": docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sq (Background: microsoft.com/en-us/research)
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It seems to only be concerned with physical fragmentation, which is unrelated. "Accelerated recovery" makes rollback/undo occur instantly by making the process logical and versioning rows directly, very much like Postgres. And like Postgres, old rows usually stored alongside new.
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Thanks for a detailed answer! I did like “optimise” as a vocabulary that would help people want to do it more often and reserve some IO bandwidth to the process. I guess “accelerated recovery” could help about as much?
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Introducing this by talking about terminology was supposed to be a joke, though now that you mention it VACUUM isn't actually a great name. 🙂