I learned of tree shaking first, and DCE is clearly superior as a term: 1) it's actually descriptive, 2) there's a large literature using this term to look for further information, and 3) as the original poster noted, it's not actually a misnomer. There is literally no advantage to the new term that I can think of.
Tree-shaking is specifically the form of DCE where you remove unreferenced functions/modules.
Especially important is that you can do tree-shaking without analyzing control flow, while by default "DCE" implies you're analyzing control flow.
And I don't think tree-shaking is a misnomer. Depending on how you visualize the metaphor, unreferenced functions are either barely attached or not attached. Shaking them off is simple and sufficiently realistic.
