Consider looking up the definition of render. You will find that it has nothing to do with pixels specifically.

There are many terms about computers in English which have been borrowed from similar acts in real life. Compiling, interpreting, context switching, branching, etc. Similarly, rendering is reserved for the last step, converting whatever you have to something which can be shown.

You render videos, text, etc. The thing is, they are not modified further, they are shown.

When you "render" to HTML, you "render it again" for display. So it's not rendering in "Computer Science Sense", hence making the usage wrong.

Otherwise, JIT and interpreted would mean the same thing, but they're not. Because JIT allows tons of other things from a techincal point of view.

Your screen buffer certainly undergoes additional transformations and modifications on the way to your monitor.

In the sense that the signal that’s generated by the photons hitting your eyes are transformed by your brain. They don’t change the essence.

However, going from text to pixels is a bigger and more profound change. You’re still in the same domain from framebuffer to the brain, with an optoisolator in the middle.

Visiting family in Iowa, I went for a run around some back roads and saw dead hogs out on the road.

I asked my grandparents what that was about. They said they were out for rendering to pick them up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products)

JS web devs. SSR as a term didn't exist until React devs decided to reinvent the wheel and give it a new name.

Nobody reinvented the wheel. The old wheel didn't run interactively on the client. The React devs that came up with the term used to be PHP devs. Do you remember XHP?

SSR simply refers to the "render" method of the react-dom package being called on server. It's similar to, but distinct from template engine/MVC-style server side generated HTML.

It's all relative though, is it not? Backend to me is different than Backend to my DBA coworker.

The word “rendering” isn’t specific to pixels at all.