I think those are essential things to do and valuable regardless of what else someone does. I do them myself all the time. I think the literature review is an amazing tool - really the best tool for learning, IME - and one that most people in the world (outside the research community) overlook.

Here we are talking about research in the science sense; those aren't research. You couldn't publish a literature review as 'research', for example, or get a Ph.D. for one - 'here's my dissertation topic - a lit review of ...'!.

There is lots of actual potential research for citizen scientists to do. And if they want to just learn from what's been discovered already, that's great - I certainly do that.

I think it's important that people understand that reading a textbook or secondary source isn't scientific research. Confusingly, now that I think of it, if you say 'I researched which EVs have the range we need', people assume you did not do actual research of driving them all. But that's a different meaning for the same word.

In your field, is 'research' used differently?