My take on it is that the government may think that under an elimination strategy any community transmission events would be perceived as failures.

The other possibility might be that earlier on in the pandemic they may have thought that a suppression strategy was possible, but it turned out that it's infectious enough and behaves randomly enough (eg. occasionally huge clusters, many cases asymptomatic) that it really doesn't allow much room for suppression strategies & elimination strategies to be much different from each other.

You're probably right on both counts.

I think community transmission is already seen as a failure whether the government likes it or not, so they might as well call it elimination.