> Maybe some people have decided to take IoT literally and redefine it to include existing technologies

I'm pretty sure it's normal to take new descriptive terms and group preexisting things into them where applicable. For example, just because the terms "car" and "motor car" came into use circa 1895 doesn't mean that nothing prior to that date can be considered a car.

Whether the definition actually works for the devices mentioned is still a valid question though.

> that definitely wasn’t the original intention of the word.

That's an odd thing to argue. We aren't talking about people who compute things when we talk about computers, are we? The original meanings of words are fairly inconsequential if over time the accepted meaning is something else.