I learned this probably later than I should have, but "serverless" now has two meanings.

The first meaning I was familiar with was the idea that there was no long-running process operating a service. This was like a lambda, executing upon a trigger and then stopping.

The second meaning I learned about more recently was the idea of "serverless" being an abstraction layer, where you don't think about what server the service is deployed on (specifically, you get to stop caring about the resources allocated to that server), even though it is deployed as a continuous, long-running process.