Two different reasons a solar system's actual output gets capped below its potential — one is a deliberate design tradeoff you engineered in, the other is imposed on you from outside.
Look at a production graph with a flat top around midday and it's tempting to call it one thing: "the system is capped." But a flattened output curve can come from two genuinely different mechanisms, with opposite implications for whether the system is well designed. One is clipping — the inverter itself capping output at its own fixed AC rating, almost always the predictable result of a deliberate, economically favorable sizing decision. The other is curtailment — the grid or interconnection agreement telling a fully capable system to make less power than it could, for reasons that have nothing to do with how the system was built. Mixing them up leads straight to the wrong diagnosis and the wrong economic conclusion.