Am not missing anything, am well aware of when terms moved from lingua franca for insiders that work in the industry, to common vernacular for the general public. Those are two completely different things.
Of course, Watts is talking as an insider. He is not Everyman Joe listening to broadcast news. He has been exposed to all the terms.
The public branding has changed, and also, so has it too for the industry that is the key data producers. The producers of the data have moved terms also. And, I think that is interesting.
Just because you say something is a myth, and a partisan fact checker say it is, does not make it so.
If something gets posted to Quora, or another question site, it is likely that something is an open question. I am not the only one to ask this.
Good science is about asking questions, hypotheses, predictions, falsification, data gathering, theory development, observations, and iteration repeatedly. Data crunching comes in particularly handy for this. Data is not inherently partisan, nor is asking tough questions. That is science as a process.
I noticed you are not responding to any of the comments I have made regarding the actual observing systems (HCN, ASOS, etc). So, to bring up things likes discrepancies between things like HCN data and remote observing system data would be overkill.
I think you want to have a political/ideological debate and I am not on HN to do that.