Why is it unhelpful? Its okay for things to be binary sometimes. This is one of those cases, where the meaning of something, beyond even tech circles, has always meant starting and building a successful business without raising outside capital.

There's no good reason to change the definition of this. The disparagement is trying to co-opt a term that shouldn't be co-opted. If the headline was how we built a 1M ARR business from seed funding it'd be a very compelling article still. Now the sourness comes from trying to redefine a term that has very concrete meaning without providing strong justification for doing so.