I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, it was really a hard problem in js (partly because functions having outside context and mainly because how mutable modules are (were, with commonjs)), so it became a huge race for optimization. Now it's really mostly dead code elimination because how much saner es modules are yet the name stays. But hey, we also don't call televisions "bigger monitors with built in spying OSS", names have a tendency to stick :)