It seems that the word “exiled” has multiple different meanings, but this is never explicitly mentioned in the CR or gatherer rulings and very confusing.
Cards like
Bane of Progress have rulings that explicitly state the difference between something being destroyed and something being put into the graveyard.
CR 701.7a says “To destroy a permanent, move it from the battlefield to its owner’s graveyard.”
CR 406.2 says “To exile an object is to put it into the exile zone from whatever zone it’s currently in.”
From that you can assume that exile is analogous to destroy, i.e. a card that exiles something and then does something for each exiled card sees each card it tried to move regardless of the zone it ended up in. The ruling on
Curse of the Swine confirms this.
The problem is that CR 406.2 also says “An exiled card is a card that’s been put into the exile zone.” This rule makes it so that cards like
Oblivion Ring won't return a Commander that went to the command zone as it was being exiled.
So to me it seems that “exiled” has two different meanings, is this actually the case? Similar effects that deal with the graveyard are easy to distinguish since “destroyed” is very different from “was put into a graveyard”, but for exile it both is “exiled”.