Until the Z cameras, Nikon AFAIK didn’t include a text nomenclature for the attached lens in any NEF metadata. Hence the exiftool amalgam [Composite]LensID tag, which if extracted with -n gives an eight-digit hex number like this:
[Composite] Lens ID : 8B 40 2D 80 2C 3C FD 0E
These eight values are a concactenation of values from the following tags: LensIDNumber, LensFStops, MinFocalLength, MaxFocalLength, MaxApertureAtMinFocal, MaxApertureAtMaxFocal, MCUVersion and LensType, and is used to look up a text value in a humongous table. See this described here:
https://exiftool.org/TagNames/Nikon.html
Scroll to the bottom of the page.
With the new Z cameras, Nikon is now putting a text nomenclature in the EXIF Lens Model tag:
[EXIF] Lens Model : NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S
Yay. I think they needed to do this because they are now apparently using software correction as a lens design trade, sacrificing distortion for resolution, and they need to clearly communicate the lens to the downstream software that is expected to correct the distortion. Lightroom won’t let you turn off the correction for this lens…