^H^H^H^H^?^?^?

That evil laughter from a disobedient tty. :(

not just that ... plenty of web apps (and maybe desktop native ones too, though I don't notice it as much there) use "smart-delete" - if the cursor has a character after it, the delete key deletes it, but if not, it operates like backspace (which ought to be labelled "delete prev").

I haven’t happened to have seen that - which web apps do it?

Hmm, at this point I think I might be imagining it ... I'll let you know if I can find it ...

Some older Apple keyboards had their backspace button labelled “delete” which to me made it sound like that was the “del” button and not the backspace button.

That was the convention on many older computing platforms.

A "Backspace" key on a typewriter did not actually delete: It merely moved the typing position back one space.