They refined the scissor mechanism. It's an improved scissor mechanism with better key stability than previous scissor keyboards on their laptops (so sort of the "best of both worlds" between the butterfly keyboard and their old scissor keyboard). The new mechanism is also used in the Magic Keyboard and 16" MacBook Pro.
"Refined" means made better. This is better than the previous keyboard, and also features 1mm of travel, making it better in that sense than any of their previous keyboards.
Imagining a word to mean what you want it to, and then reacting negatively to that, that doesn't say as much about Apple as it does the observer.
"Refined" is also an adjective that has a definition close to "new and wonderful". It's not just a word to bring out an emotional response to make people feel like buying the thing.