Dumb Question (possibly) about Cloning and Imaging Disks

Nope.

The first time the drive was cloned is "cloning".

Updating a "cloned" drive by doing a diff is not the same thing.

You're going by vendor marketing speak.

Long time ago, clone meant exact replica. More recently, it is often used to mean a functional copy, but not necessarily exact replica.

Usually nowadays when "cloning" some things are not copied ( e.g. sys vol info) and some things are changed e.g. disk id, bcd store, device info, etc.

Some bootable programs still do exact replicas in the original sense, e.g. Clonezilla.

Well anyway, I keep updated clones and system images using Casper and both processes seem to work extremely well. I've never used Macrium Reflect, so I can't compare the two. I've got a redundant 8 or 9 year old W7 Lenovo laptop, so I might set that up with Macrium just to learn about it.