Related self promotion: this factoid about spaces, along with other fun slices in the evolution of writing, features in my decade-ago Ignite talk “For the love of letters”
The whole -oid suffix, really. Asteroids aren't really stars, meteoroids aren't really meteors, androids aren't really men, spheroids aren't really spheres, factoids aren't really facts, etc.
I think you might be right but not definitively so: the Oxford dictionary has your definition, as does the New Oxford American dictionary which also lists the following as North American usage:
> a brief or trivial item of news or information
Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural? At what point does something that began as an unambiguous error become rescued by the popularity of the mistake?
> Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural?
That’s entirely unrelated and uncontroversial; one is the plural of a “people,” as in multiple distinct groups of folks with shared culture, nationality, or other traits, whereas the other is the possessive form of a word that is already plural, so I’m not sure if that’s a red herring or if you’ve actually seen such incorrect usage being advocated for.
There are some analogies to biology. Virtually all our DNA is the result of an error at some point (barring creationist theories) but that backstory isn't a reason to dismiss concerns against (or even for) a particular mutation. Surely nobody would downplay the drop of 3 base-pairs as "acktually normal when you look at the big picture for our species" when talking to people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.
I'll add "factoid."
For some of the samples on that site, it'd question whether they even have majority-support as "correct" when brought to people's conscious attention, as opposed to simply being a popular mistake they don't object-to. (Do any polls exist? The nature of the content evades easy search-terms.)