That is my point entirely. That is not the definition of chemical. If you mean non-naturally occurring chemical say that.
The scaremongers definition of chemical and has no place in scientific literature.
So how is it scaremongering? It is both accurate (PFOAs, etc are indeed chemicals) and of the proper connotation in the common parlance (using "chemical" to mean something manmade rather than naturally occurring).
Your argument holds no water.
By the way, an article in Scientific American isn't scientific literature. It's a magazine intended at lay audiences. You might be confusing it with something like Nature journal.
Using chemical to mean something man made is factually incorrect. It's in our best interest to educate against its misuse rather than acknowledge/encourage it, particularly in this case because the line between the two things is hazy at best.
People learn to associate "chemical" with "bad" and a certain class of "chemical-sounding" names with "chemical". It would be better if the lay knowledge and perception of chemicals was more nuanced, so that it is realized that chemicals are not bad due to their membership in this category, but for other, more complex reasons.
There are bad chemicals and there are good chemicals, and there is no shortcut to knowing which is which other than putting effort into understanding the mechanisms.
I think penalising this usage of the word "chemical" might further this goal.