Agreed. At some point, in a well designed app, you've got a data store, an I/O layer, and something that coordinates amongst the components. There are a million ways to decide where the "business logic" should live, whether application state and external data should be treated differently, or exactly how all the pieces are glued together. At the end of the day though, it's all pretty much the same paradigm.
It sounds to me like Flux goes with a model layer that handles all state (internal to the app and not), pushes most binding between pieces of the UI to the view layer, and uses a thin controller layer to mediate the other two layers and coordinate parts of the model layer with overlapping concerns.
I once had the epiphany that an entire web app is pretty much a whole bunch of nested or concatenated MVCs. I think the confusion arrives when people assume that there is one-and-only-one MVC and try to shoehorn all the parts of a new workflow into that rigid structure. I don't think that the proliferation of acronyms purporting to be something different helps with understanding.
To add to the acronym soup, what you described (nested MVC) is known as HMVC, and I agree that it's what most frameworks end up as, regardless of what they end up calling it. It works very well in my opinion, too, to the point where I'm currently working on a framework like that myself (as a learning exercise)
It sounds to me like Flux goes with a model layer that handles all state (internal to the app and not), pushes most binding between pieces of the UI to the view layer, and uses a thin controller layer to mediate the other two layers and coordinate parts of the model layer with overlapping concerns.
I once had the epiphany that an entire web app is pretty much a whole bunch of nested or concatenated MVCs. I think the confusion arrives when people assume that there is one-and-only-one MVC and try to shoehorn all the parts of a new workflow into that rigid structure. I don't think that the proliferation of acronyms purporting to be something different helps with understanding.