Thanks for your extra thoughts -- I think they add some very relevant color that I was intentionally omitting.

I think there are lot of loaded words in our political vocabulary and their meaning can have subtle (or even significant) shifts based on who uses them. If "virtue signaling" includes a connotation of insincerity, and that aspect changes everything entirely as you show.

I used it in a more strictly technical sense, but I think it fair to say that with most language the neutral, technical version is the least common in actual usage.