> But it misses the most obvious answer (and most likely where the question originated from): terminal, console, and shell often refer to the same thing.

Not really. If you ask people at watercooler which _shell_ they are using you are getting 20 minutes conversation about whether zsh is better than fish or vice versa. And if you ask same question about _terminal_ it would be mostly about whether their favorite terminal is GPU accelerated and supports ligatures :)