I'm not techno babbling you. I specifically said "if you consider the model + kv cache together," e.g preserved. A kv cache is not an internal optimization, a model cannot generate text without a kv cache. There's a separate idea of caching the kv cache between requests as an optimization. That's not the one I'm talking about.
Or if it helps, consider it just within one generation. The model + kv cache. Does that not match your definition?