Amen. This seems to be a hangup for a lot of people. As I once said here:

EOF (end of file) is not a thing. It's a condition, a state of being.

In the same way that "dead" is not a thing. You cannot have a dead, you cannot hold a dead. You cannot give away a dead, and you can't write a dead to a file.

Of course, if the tty is in raw mode we can nitpick this to death (hee!) but for the most part it holds.