“Do you consider nuclear actions that convert mass to energy, creating energy?”
The saying, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, is really saying that the energy in the universe is whatever energy the universe has, whether in the form of the “conserved” energy in matter, or energy being given off when matter is converted to energy, which includes energy that has not yet condensed back to matter and energy that is in the process of converting back to matter. It’s all the energy the universe has.
When physicists speak of matter, they express matter mathematically in values of the “conserved energy” any element of matter contains.
Matter and energy are different states of “matter” in one sense or “energy” in another sense. It depends on the context.
Then would you also say “Mass cannot be created or destroyed”?