The "industry" is comprised of much more than techies -- there are millions of marketing people out there who get hyped up at the shallowest sounding buzzword and we absolutely never will out-shout them. Nor do customers who love buzzwords.
Buzzwords can be fickle things. “Wireless” used to mean radio. Who calls the internet “the information superhighway” anymore? “Computer” used to be a job title. How many job ads capitalise “PC/MAC” even though it’s a contraction of Macintosh and not an initialism like Personal Computer is? The first “tablet” I bought was a Wacom — an accessory, not a computer in its own right. When did we stop calling pocket computers “PDAs”?
"Digital" used to mean something that related to fingers or toes. Then it meant "electronic". Now it means "distributed via network instead of physical medium", even though it's the first "D" in "DVD".
It's not just marketers. The vast majority of engineers are just fine with this term. The set of people complaining about it are a tiny minority.
I'm the lead engineer on Cloudflare Workers. We didn't originally call it "serverless", but after talking to lots of engineers who said "Oh so it's serverless?" we decided to go with that term. The decision was not made by marketers.
There's nothing "ouch" about it. People understand a term to mean a thing, we are doing that thing, we adopt the same term, now everyone understands what we're doing. Communication is good.
