No, think of the following scenario: you and your friend know that you want to communicate in the future about something, maybe the outcome of some future event. You generate a long random key, and somewhere later in the future, you send the information using the pre-shared key.

It's a real encryption, much-much better than basically anything before because it's really unbreakable.

It's a useful technique if you're not ready to transmit the message yet, but you can safely distribute keys. Think of a spy going out into the field. They carry a booklet with the key. As messages arrive later, they progressively go through the booklet to decode them. The messages are perfectly secure over the wire.

It's not useful or practical in many situations that we associate with cryptography over the internet, but it certainly has its applications.

Almost every other cryptographic scheme exists in order to increase convenience, at the expense of some security. The one time pad method is "perfectly" secure (assuming the key is securely generated, and kept safe), everything else is less than perfect (although computationally improbable).

It is encryption, but not very convenient. You forget that there is one important use of encryption, and that is in military operations. A one-time pad would be a good choice in this situation---you give soldiers who need to receive encrypted messages the keys on paper so that they can be teared and destroyed, one by one. For each message, you take the next key, decrypt the message, and then destroy the key so it's never used. Of course, if they compromise the keys on any end, it's game over, but mathematically it's as secure as it gets.

Except in some cases you may have a way of securely communicating the key at an earlier point in time.

For example, you generating a 1TB key before leaving on a trip you could imagine a VPN set up that encrypted 1TB of traffic in a way that was theoretically unbreakable by someone sniffing the traffic only.