Why, oh why do we have smart individuals replacing internet with the word for the visual analogy we used to represent the internet to not knowing better people in position of power ?

This is not a damn cloud ! This a remote computer you can access over the internet. Can we stop with this use of marketing lingo please ?

Sorry buddy, that ship has already sailed. Terms become popular because they are useful. We all know cloud means "a remote computer accessed over the internet", but that is rather cumbersome phrase. "Cloud" says it in 5 characters. Can you suggest a better term?

As a fan of both linguistic games and playing devil's advocate, how about:

"server"

6 characters, sorry ;-)

"host"... 4 characters, beats cloud...?

"Cloud" refers to a commoditized service, generally highly available / performant.

"Host" is generally less ambiguous, referring to a specific thing given the context of the discussion. It's a pronoun for machines (kinda).

Terms become popular because they're useful, but useful to whom?

The purpose of the original coinage of the word "cloud" was to obfuscate that you really meant "someone else's computer". It gives a nice warm, fuzzy decentralised impression - clouds are natural and ubiquitous! No one owns them! If it's in "the cloud" (note the definite article) then it's safe in the very fabric of the network, right?

Nope. It's in Larry and Sergey's basement. Not decentralised at all. Just somewhere else.

The proper term is "server", "datacenter", or "network", depending on what you're actually trying not to say.