Generate succeeded. The channel still cannot call the service.

We generated the service from the Hub project. The channel gets a connection error. Is generate the same as deploy?

No. Generate builds the service from the project and the generator. Deploy is the next step: the Hub deploy action, the CLI, or your pipeline. The deploy action needs Hub configured for that environment. After deploy, connect the runtime back to Hub so the project and the running service agree. A generated folder on a laptop is not a channel endpoint.