While the first the 3 humps of E do get the LCD to a known state of 8 bit mode, it isn't always 3 actual function set commands.
As far as the programmer is concerned they are.
All we have to know is the documented commands.
And there were three of them.
. . . everything else . . .
It's interesting, but we don't really have to care about any of that. All we are concerned about is that the three 'commands' that we sent did what ever was necessary to put the LCD controller into a known state.
Now all we have to do is agree on what what we want to call that sequence. If the device had a hardware input to achieve the same result it would probably be called 'reset'. . . .
Don