> but tt's generally a good idea for the UI to have a different data model than the database

You're not wrong and most other comments are responding this from some sort of UI library perspective, like React / Svelte. However, if you're using even the barebones scaffolded UI using LiveViews from Phoenix, you don't have to do any of these. Phoenix will wire up the form to the changesets by default. Which is what I'm referring to.

Phoenix does have that. ViewModels. I don't think its required to use though, but we always do.