”Lock free” has a very precise meaning in computer science, and it’s this: ”given some number of threads of execution, an algorithm is lock free if in some finite number of steps, at least one thread is guaranteed to make forward progress”. When using mutexes, this is not guaranteed under any amount contention: the scheduler is perfectly free to preempt a thread holding a lock, which means no threads make progress.

However, if you use a CAS loop (like this code does) to update some value (i.e. a while loop that repeatedly tries to execute a compare-and-swap), that loop will only fail to make progress if some other thread DID make progress. This means that such an algorithm is in fact lock-free: if thread X didn’t progress, it is necessarily because some other thread did. In addition, a scheduler preempting a thread at any point will not stop other threads making progress.

Whether an algorithm is lock free or not is not a matter of opinion, it is a mathematical statement. The fact that it annoys you is… weird.