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Yes, that's true. That's why I limited the (tangential, and so unelaborated) point to "practical terms..."
As for the rest, I've had this conversation many times over the years, and the answer ultimately depends on your question, which you don't appear to have clearly stated yet. Calling out a "Nicene Creed of Marxism" is akin to the "true Communism has never been tried" trope. In my experience, cultural Marxists tend to regard themselves as Marxists, or Marxists-plus, or also Marxists, while avowed Marxists may or may not accept cultural Marxism, but I have never seen a rigorous attempt at putting empirical numbers to these things. Presumably, that would be difficult or impossible now; "cultural Marxism" has been a somewhat contested term for a long time, and its memory-holing into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" has only made that worse.
So in general I would say that the term "cultural Marxist" should probably be avoided simply because it's been hopelessly muddied. But at the same time, when people insist that it just is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, or that it has nothing to do with Marxism as an ideology, I just have to point out that this is wrong as a matter of history. It certainly evolved from Marxism; it certainly is intellectually downstream of Marxism; it certainly shares many structural features with Marxism. If a "true Marxist" feels the need to gatekeep and insist that "cultural Marxism" is an ideological heresy, like, fine? I don't have a horse in that race, I'm happy to taboo "cultural Marxism" so long as the conversation is not explicitly about the term "cultural Marxism."
But you seem to be attributing fallacious reasoning to the people talking about cultural Marxism, whereas I and others responding to you are focused instead on the mischief of the people who muddied the term in the first place. If there was a group who called themselves cultural Marxists (there was) and this group believed the things they are accused of believing (they did) and later on the term was abandoned by its users because it had become a useful tool in the enemy's toolbox (it had), then getting conspicuously annoyed with the aforementioned enemies who go on using the term anyway seems like misdirected ire from anyone who is not, well, part of the group-formerly-known-as-cultural-Marxists.
All my enemies get their talking points from Plato. What pisses me off is that they don't seem to realize it.
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