How else would you have understood it? At this level it's literally just pedantics. In the same way you can say C doesn't technically compile to assembly for CPUs. The point is that it's the lower abstraction level that is still (more or less) human readable. But just like in CUDA, you may want to write parts of your code in it if you want to benefit from things that the higher level language doesn't expose. The terminology might seem different, but in practice it is pretty analogous.