I believe perfect blocks do count towards staggering the enemy. I’ve put several larger enemies into the stagger state from perfect blocks. I’m running the Motivity build described above and it works great. I will say that dodging and blocking are both very important. Some enemies are better to dodge and some are better to block.
Lies of P advice request
Warning - there are no spoilers in my question, but there will probably be gameplay mechanics spoilers in any answers (hopefully)....