“Vegan” products you buy at the store are made by humans, who are a type of animal, so you cannot say that vegan products contain no animal products. Plastic is an animal product because humans make it, and humans are animals.

If we go down this road, the only conclusions we get are absurd and useless ones. Language is a consensus process dominated by metaphor and shared context. It is not a mathematical process.

That is an acceptable and different definition of “server”. Words have multiple definitions, that’s why any time you look something up in the dictionary, you are likely to see multiple entries for the same word.

I generally don’t use the word “server” that way. I say “machine” when I am talking about machines, and “server” when I am talking about daemon processes. A great many people I have worked with in the past ten years or so, in multiple parts of the country, have adopted similar terminology to lessen confusion.

If you accept that words have multiple definitions, and accept that “server” has multiple definitions, then it is easy to accept that “serverless” means something like “the response is not ultimately processed by a daemon process”. Just like we accept that wireless headphones are called “wireless headphones”, even though they have wires inside. They are only missing one particular set of wires. Like, “the audio is not transmitted to the headphones over a wire” wireless, “the request is ultimately processed by something other than a long-running daemon” serverless.

I find these definitions easy to understand, natural to use, and I find that they don’t confuse listeners when I use them.

I avoid calling the machine a “server” because it is sometimes confusing, but I’m not going to argue with someone who uses it that way and tell them that they are wrong. That would be horrible.