That's not accurate. You send them a 'Certificate Signing Request', which is a request for them to issue you with a certificate. It's not a complete certificate

That's not accurate. You send them a 'Certificate Signing Request', which is a request for them to issue you with a certificate. It's not a complete certificate template just lacking a signature. In any case... semantically a certificate isn't a certificate until it's been certified, it's just meaningless paper. In some ways this reminds me of the misconception about birth (and marriage) certificates from people new to genealogy. In the UK a birth certificate is just a piece of paper that contains markers of authentication to ensure people who read it can trust that it's true likeness of a record held at Her Majesty's GRO. It doesn't provide any guarantees about the honesty of data itself, or even if the person was ever born, in the same way me reading an x509 doesn't guarantee the data it contains is factual or was issued to the right person. Even if a CA does these checks, there's no way to insert a proof of such in to a certificate, therefore the certificate isn't such a proof...