One complicating factor in the vocabulary is how many leftists I've found use "liberals" as a shorthand for "neoliberals" and "neoliberalism" which today are mostly associated with the American right wing. (It's the label for a lot of "free market Capitalism" ideas of the last century or so, generally post-WW2. The "liberal" meaning "free" as in "free market". "Liberal" is partly the shorthand because it does seem silly to label something from WW2 as "neo"/"new".) In that usage of "liberals" it becomes a derision of "liberal Capitalism" in general and the American right wing in specific. (Basically "fiscally liberal" as opposed to something like "socially liberal", which a lot of the left prefers to use terms more like "progressivism", to distinguish. That "fiscally liberal" means basically the same thing today that the right often means by "fiscally conservative", because neoliberalism has been the mostly unchecked status quo since at least the Reagan administration, is its own lovely fractal in why language can be so hard.)
Left/right, liberal/conservative, these axes were often over-simplifying to begin with, and adding in centuries of debates between them doesn't help make the vocabulary any clearer.