Yes indeed. Eg a camera location coordinate can be thrown at these kinds of things (this is 2d, eg quadtrees, but similar things exist for 3d also, see octtrees

Yes indeed. Eg a camera location coordinate can be thrown at these kinds of things (this is 2d, eg quadtrees, but similar things exist for 3d also, see octtrees), and it return all the 3d objects in that space (out of a huge number of objects in the entire "universe"). And then the program processes that reduced list of objects. I think of these as like a prefilter.