Your correct. It is redundant. I think I needed the lvm layer to get an installer to recognize the luks partition. Can’t remember if it’s Pop or Fedora. That installer bug might be fixed now though. One day I’ll check and update my drive so its just using btrfs on luks.

I like to use btrfs subvolumes inside a luks lvm volume for this reason.

As much as I want to jump to conclusions, I can’t help but think that this might be a correlation versus causation situation. It’s possible that search engine results and their rankings were given different weights in a model. Ads would more often show up first in a search result.