I think photogrammetry produces point clouds

Yes, and then polygonal models (and other things) are built from those.

For anyone who wants a more technical dive into the photogrammetry pipeline, here's a video I made for a company called Mapware for NVIDIA GTC 21: https://youtu.be/ktDVWzshR4w?t=331

Some techniques for downsampling point clouds use voxelgrid representations but in general you're mapping pixel data from varied images to each other in space and producing points from that to try and capture surface geometry.

Typically it creates polygonal models with the photos used to directly texture them.