Yeah; it's not strictly accurate, but in a similar sense that it's not strictly accurate to call the typical copper Ethernet connector "RJ45", to say that a UDP "connection" occurred, or to say that a modem connects to a "DB-9" serial port.

I suspect the root of the problem is that over time, "proxy" has become strongly associated with application-layer protocols like HTTP, and after that shift it wasn't obvious what to use for something lower-level that encompassed a wider range of protocols/endpoints/conversations. In principle, "tunnel" would probably have been better (and a legible metaphor to boot), but that's just not how things shook out in practice.

Seeing as Hacker News is ostensibly composed largely of people in-the-know, we could certainly use appropriate terminology unlike the commons.

A lot of people live exclusively on layer 7, which is fine.

Usages exist inside contexts, and the context of the post you replied to was unambiguous. Changing it like s/VPNs/services advertised as VPNs/ would not clarify anything to anyone, and changing it like s/VPNs/proxies/ would be less clear (since the author was likely referring to commercial services, not servers in a network).

This is correct. This entire conversation demonstrates how bad technical people are at understanding people.

"VPN" services do in fact use VPN, they're not HTTP based. It is technically appropriate to call them as such, as awkward as it is.