bash's EPOCHREALTIME was inspired by mksh, which was in turn inspired by zsh. And in zsh, EPOCHREALTIME was named after the system real-time clock (specifically the CLOCK_REALTIME clock ID passed to clock_gettime()). And i imagine that was named by analogy with hardware real-time clocks, since they both track human ('real') time. But i don't know much about electronics or the history of POSIX clock sources.

And does it even count leap seconds? Regular Unix timestamps do not (time stands still during leap seconds)