If you read the whole thread, I would not have to spell this out. These are preservatives (source):

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• sage
• mustard
• mustard seed
• cumin
• black pepper
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves
• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

They generally work by killing/repelling/deterring unwanted microbes. Before yesterday, I thought salt worked similarly to the others. Yesterday I learnt that salt exceptional and only functions as a preservative due to a different mechanism (drying effect).

Your logic is nonsense. To claim that because substance X does not kill /everything/, it cannot be a preservative – it’s broken logic. Nothing on that list of food preservatives kills or deters every microbe. Of course they selectively mitigate “the bad bacteria” (but note it’s a bit straw mannish to use the article “the” in your phrasing imply /all/ unwanted microbes; preservatives mitigate enough unwanted microbes to justify use as a preservative).