Yes it does. If OP says "I refuse to pay that charge", AA's recourse is to say "okay, well then we are not going to sell you a ticket over the phone" not to secretly sell the ticket with the charge the OP did not consent to included.

By your logic, if you went into a store and saw that they had a desk that was interesting to you but it had a $100 delivery fee that you thought was too much and you told them that you would gladly buy the desk, but you thought the delivery fee was too much and then left, then it would be okay for the store to just ship you the desk anyway (including the $100 fee) a week later because you had indicated interest in the desk. Clearly that wouldn't be okay, I'm struggling to see why anyone thinks the airlines get a free pass on functionally identical behavior.