I really should re-read some books. Thanks!

Don't fret it. Imo people are being unnecessarily curt when trying to flex their pedantry here, which we all love to do, myself included.

Of course, poly still means there is an exponential in the time complexity.

It's really nothing beyond the main takeaway that the usual norm to describe something as having "exponential" growth is that the number of computations increases in order of magnitude every time you add but a single item to the list of inputs.