Oh hush, you. You know how much extra they're paying us because they have low profit expectations? Let the investors keep calling it tech.
But seriously, I think one could make a distinction between companies that focus on using new technology to scale businesses (which are mostly old, but can be scaled in new ways using technology) vs. old businesses that focus on just remaining old businesses. The idea being that if you are a "tech" company, you are rolling the dice on being able to expand much harder/faster than a company could have with older technology, and also have significant downside in that regard. To be a 'tech company' in this regard is to be trying to get big in ways that make it more likely you will get big or go bankrupt, whereas a more traditional company might take a more conservative approach.
I mean, the important distinction here that the market is maybe missing is that if an old company puts enough effort (or rather, has enough success) scaling their business using new technology, they probably should be put in the same risk/reward bucket, and if you do succeed, well, you probably should no longer be thought of as a 'tech' company by this definition. Like I think you could argue that Apple might not be a 'tech' company by that definition (you could argue that they were a tech company when they figured out how to sell pocket computers to normal people - of course, you could also argue that they try to do that all the time, it's just they are at the point in their product development lifecycle where they have a super successful old product and none of their new stuff is really that visible.)