It's a "lie" in that of course there's a server, what else would your code run on? But we "lie" all the time by omission or shorthand or euphemism. "Cloud" computing doesn't really occur in the stratosphere, and "serverless" still runs on servers in the "cloud", and by "server" I don't mean waitstaff ;-)

I agree that it's a dumb name that doesn't really say what it means and "ephemeral" might be better, but "serverless" is better than "clouds-you-rent-by-the-second".

I don’t think anyone really believes there isn’t a server underneath somewhere.

Serverless implies more that you’re not the one managing the machine. Also connects to the cattle not pets paradigm